Part I: Outsider
Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. —Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
The Void, Outside of Prime Dome
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.10 Interstellar
Prime Dome’s early shift started in the dark. Janus Invarian crowded into the airlock with twenty other mechanics, engineers, surveyors, and agronomists. They wore hard suits, soft suits, and custom-activity suits. They carried heavy tools and ruggedized scanners. What little conversation existed among the tired and sometimes hungover workers died as helmets were sealed and the last of the air was sucked from the room.
The outer door rotated open, and they stumbled out into the dust. Prime Dome’s inner light cast long shadows ahead of them. Other than that, the only brightness in the frigid vacuum was faint starlight and the stabbing beams of suit lamps.
There was a particular gait to the more experienced workers like Janus. They moved deliberately, lifting their back foot heel-first, toe pointed, before setting it down flat-footed in a long step that made them look like they were lumbering giants. The casual vac-workers—the people who only went out once a month or were simply walking from the main dome to one of the smaller facilities—let their boots drag through the fine particulates, suit lamps jittering and sweeping across the gray landscape, drawing curses from the people who walked through the dust every day, one suit rupture away from death.
Janus knew better than most how deadly the void could be, so his movements were slow and fluid, his visual scan methodical, his attention unwavering. He didn’t curse his ancestors or the Survivor, like his uncle sometimes did, although it was hard to understand them sometimes. Irkalla was the manifestation of an uncaring universe, uncompromising in its power, unwavering in its revolutions. It was all Janus’s family could do to survive it. But their ancestors had fled a devastating war that ravaged thousands of worlds in a small fleet of civilian and military ships, and they could have gone anywhere but home. So why in the void’s name did they settle here?
He reached the site of the first maintenance task on his list and got to work.
Four hours later, the air in his suit was dense with the smell of exertion. It had been a rough half-shift. The broken gas reclamator he was working on just wanted to stay broken, and he was running late on his impossibly tight schedule. He barely registered the first rays of sunlight as they made the quartz crystal in the ultrafine dust sparkle. The thermometer on his suit steadily ticked upward, and with the first tendrils of sun just peeking over the horizon, void or not, it was going to get hot fast.
That didn’t mean he was going to rush the job. Clearing out the gas reclamation pumps at the waste processing pit was literally a shit job, but it required someone careful and precise. and he valued the trust Prime Dome put in him. He wasn’t about to betray that trust by not fixing everything to the best of his abilities.
Even if it took a little longer.
Fifteen minutes later, his visor fogged up and his wrist sore, he finally managed to run the purge cycle, clearing the crap and other solids from the line.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
He packed his tools up and strapped them to his suit, then climbed out of the processing pit, and immediately saw the growing queue stretching outside of the airlock, which was odd. This late, only the slow and the overly diligent should have still been out, unless something was wrong. As he made his way toward the swarm of hard suits eager to get out of the void and back into the comfort and relative safety of atmosphere and climate control at the end of early shift, he could see the growing impatience of the workers from their subtle, anxious movements. Janus clenched his jaw. Someone didn’t do their job.
The speaker in his helmet crackled to life. Ryler Abraxxis, his best friend, was pinging him on a private channel “Janus? You out here? Some Survivor-cursed jackass is about to override the safety protocols. Wanted to check before explosive decompression took us all out.”
“On my way,” Janus responded as he hustled to make his way to the front, weathering the glares through the faceplates of the gathered masses. It was always risky to draw attention as an outsider, but he didn’t have enough friends to let Ryler die over someone else’s carelessness.
Why the materials specialist was out here for early shift was anyone’s guess, but Ryler was a man of varied interests and great enthusiasm.
As Janus squeezed through the small opening in the outer airlock doors, a big guy, or at least a bigger hard suit, took offense as Janus brushed past him. “Hey, where you think you're going, buddy?” Janus heard over the public channel.
Janus turned and faced the bigger man down. “You can let me in there to fix it, or you can bake outside. What’s it going to be?”
“Dude, let him through,” Ryler said, poking his head around the jammed lock. “You really want to argue with a Prometheus Base survivor about a broken airlock?”
Janus winced at the mention of his long-dead home dome, but he was grateful when the big worker backed down, letting him get inside. The last thing he needed right now was to have to deal with the human element along with the mechanical.
“What's the problem?” Janus asked over the public channel.
The hard suit in front of the access panel turned and looked at him. The man shrugged, his whole suit raising and lowering with his shoulders. “Same thing it always is. The hydraulic system locked up. There’s no leak. I'm gonna override it.”
“You know there's a stacking point-five percent chance of disaster every time someone runs that software bypass?” Ryler responded. “It's designed for emergencies, not convenience.”
“Hey, if it'll get us inside, that's all that matters,” the guy at the panel said.
“Just give me a minute with it,” Janus said, bumping the man’s shoulder gently with his fist.
The man made a face behind his visor, but he made room.
Janus looked the thing over. If an air bubble had worked its way into the tubing, letting the gears run dry, it could indeed cause a problem. It was unlikely, but it was also life or death, and making sure was the difference between them getting home late and half a dozen breached suits.
He didn't see any fluid or residue, and the line felt charged, but he opened another panel just adjacent to the controls anyway, pulled out the hand pump, and flushed the system manually. Even if the leak was somewhere he couldn’t see, the system would self-seal and draw on the reserve supply until sector maintenance came to service it.
“Seriously?” The guy Janus had moved out of the way groused. “Just override it!”
“Better to be sure and late than on time and dead,” Ryler responded in Janus’s place.
“Time is money, asshole. Do you know who I am?” the man asked, but Janus just kept pumping. When he was done, he checked the readout again, and this time the sensors showed green.
Janus initiated the open sequence and the outer airlock doors closed behind them, air flooded the chamber, and the inner lock opened slowly, revealing a beautiful thing inside: home, or at least what he'd come to accept as home.
“Finally,” the impatient worker grumbled as he pushed past Janus with an unnecessary nudge. Several others followed on his trail, so quickly that Janus was stuck watching the throng make its way inside before going in himself. Most didn't give him as much as a glance, but a small minority touched their hand to their chins in thanks as they passed.
When he finally made his way into the airlock, he saw Ryler had also waited until the crowd cleared before they entered the inner doors together.
“Nice fix, Janus,” Ryler said. “Sorry those crater heads took it for granted.”
Janus shrugged. “It's not a big deal. Everyone's busy, and most don't realize how dangerous a blown lock could be. We haven’t had one in years.”
“They’re jamming all the time, now. I think people just forget how thin the margin of error is. The Survivor watches over the vigilant.”
Janus nodded. “And the void doesn’t forget, or forgive.”