Invarian Home, Prometheus Base

Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge

4439.11.22 Interstellar

“Janus?” his mother has said. “Janus, I need you to be brave. Stay in the apartment. Lock the door. Protect your sister, no matter what happens.”

Janus hugged Callie, his two-year-old sister, as she squirmed and screeched in his arms. The high-pitched alarm was upsetting her, and it seemed like she was trying to drown it out with her own screams. Janus hugged her and held on, even when she hit him in the chin with her flailing fist because he wasn’t upset.

Janus was scared.

The alarm wasn’t as unfamiliar to him as it was to her. He’d heard it once a month for as long as he could remember, both at home and, later, in the classroom when he’d started school. That alarm went off every month, on the first day of the month, two hours into the day cycle, except today.

To hear it now could only mean one unthinkable thing: the dome had been breached.

It was just Janus and Callie in the apartment. It was supposed to be a holiday, a celebration. People had come from all over. Janus’s father had gone to Dome Admin to oversee preparations, and his mother had left an hour ago. The alarms had been sounding for twenty minutes—longer than they ever had before—and Janus couldn’t get in touch with either of his parents, or anyone else for that matter, because the noosphere—the network that connected all the inhabitants and visitors of Prometheus Base—was down.

Janus swallowed. After the first few minutes of the alarm going off and Callie screaming, a different kind of silence filled the apartment. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t reach his parents or emergency services or dome security; he was completely cut off from information. No newsfeeds. No readouts on the state of the dome. Whatever danger had come to Prometheus Base could be in a completely different district or lurking in the hallway outside the door. Should he leave or stay? Should he take Callie with him or go get help? Had he heard screams through the walls, or was his imagination creating monsters?

Three loud thumps rattled the front door of the apartment, making him jump.

Callie stopped crying instantly and turned toward the new sound, reaching for it with her little hand. Something about that calmed Janus. If Callie’s upset could vanish that quickly, maybe his own fears would, too. “Mom?” he called out.

Thump, thump, thump! came the answer, shaking the door and sending Janus scooting back into the couch cushions as if he could disappear into them.

“Computer, emergency lockdown!” he cried out, his reedy twelve-year-old voice cracking from the adrenaline.

Security bolts slammed home.

For a moment, there was a pause, and Janus held his breath, hoping the person or thing on the other side of the door would just… go away. Then something heavy slammed into the front door, Callie squealed in terror, and Janus ran into his bedroom.

He looked around frantically. The familiar and safe space was suddenly made hostile by its lack of places to hide. There was no space below the bed, no other exit except back toward danger. After a frantic heartbeat’s hesitation, Janus hefted Callie and climbed into his wall closet, pulling the door shut behind him.

It was the two of them in the dark. Janus could still hear muffled sounds from the living room of someone smashing their way in.

Callie was fussing.

“Please be quiet,” Janus whispered urgently. “Please, please, please be quiet, Callie!”

There was a screech of protesting metal and motors, and Janus finally got a signal on his wrist comm, accompanied by a flashing red light in the bottom right of his retinal display.

Intruder alert. Notifying Dome Security… Connection failed. Notifying Dome Security…Connection failed.

Callie started to moan, and Janus slapped a hand over her mouth. “Shhh!”

Heavy boot steps sounded from the living room, heading toward them.

Callie bit his hand with the lack of restraint of a toddler, and this time, it was Janus’s turn to hold back a shriek. Tears filled his eyes, but the scream died in his throat.

The boot steps were in the bedroom, separated from them by nothing more than a simple closet door.

“Janus?” a man’s gruff voice called out.

“Uncle Ivan?” Janus said, relief washing over him. He pushed the closet door open at the same time as his uncle pulled the handle.

“Come on, boy! We don’t have time for games!” Uncle Ivan was wearing a full, helmeted void suit, although the vacuum-proof outfit was of an advanced make Janus had only ever seen during the annual Trials.

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“Mom told me to stay here with Callie,” Janus said, climbing out.

“Your mother is dead, Janus,” Uncle Ivan said, and the words hit Janus in the chest like Ivan had kicked him. “Now, come on!” Ivan grabbed Janus—still carrying Callie—by the shoulder and propelled him toward the front door.

Outside the apartment was all the chaos Janus had feared. The air smelled like vomit and electrical shortages. He saw scorch marks on the walls, bodies, and bloodstains. His feet slipped in a patch of dripping oil, and he would have fallen had Ivan not caught him back the back of the coveralls and hauled him to his feet. Passages had been barricaded. More doors had been broken into, and streaks of red were going into or out of them—Janus couldn’t tell.

He was having trouble processing it all.

His uncle shoved him when he slowed down, and Callie was trying to break free of his arms, and his mother was dead. “Where’s dad?” he managed to choke out.

“What happened to your hand?” Ivan asked instead of answering.

“What?” Janus looked at his right hand and saw he was bleeding badly. “Callie bit me.”

Ivan grunted. “Get some disinfectant on that as soon as possible.”

“Where are we going?” Janus asked.

Ivan overrode the lockdown on a door, and Janus flinched back as the heavy metal barrier slid up to reveal one of the freight bays. Ivan shoved him inside.

The freight bay was full of containers, devoid of people. Ivan marched over to a rust-red container, punched a code into the keypad, and the door unsealed. “Get in.”

“I want to know what’s going on,” Janus said.

Ivan cuffed him on the side of the head and shouted, “Get in the damned box!”

Janus was shocked. Uncle Ivan had never so much as raised his voice at Janus and Callie before. “Get in the box, boy. You stay in there, and you stay quiet. Get suited up, and get your sister suited up as well. Do yours first. The box has its own oxygen supply, but you can’t rely on that. Not today.” Ivan reached for his shoulder, but Janus shrunk back, and he thought he might have seen a flash of regret on his uncle’s face before it was replaced with grim resolve. Janus backed into the container, not taking his eyes off Ivan.

Ivan closed the door, and the container hissed as it sealed shut and pressurized.

The sounds and smells from outside—the squealing alarm and the smells of vomit, offal, and smoke—faded to only a trace.

Janus and Callie were alone again.

Callie squirmed, and Janus set her down. His two-year-old sister seemed surprised by this development and looked up at him curiously, then got distracted by the new space and tottered off, arms wide, her delight at her newfound freedom on display.

Janus shivered and hugged his arms. He wanted to cry. According to his uncle, his mother was dead, and Janus didn’t even know if that was true. He’d asked about his father and gotten nothing. Dead people were lying in the hallways, and no one was helping. His uncle had hit him for asking a question. It felt like the whole world was ending but, worse, it felt like he couldn’t do anything about it because he didn’t know anything.

What if Uncle Ivan was lying?

There was a muffled screech from outside the container, and a new, quieter, but no less urgent alarm went off inside the container. A small display screen on the wall flashed red. Container locked. Equalize pressure before opening doors. Janus dismissed the alarm and saw that the freight bay had somehow become unpressurized.

The void, that ever-present and all-consuming reality of his homeworld, was just outside the door.

Like all children, Janus had been trained to suit up in the event of a breach, but that had been in a controlled environment. “Six seconds,” he said under his breath. That was how long someone would stay conscious if exposed to a vacuum without a suit. The container creaked as the vacuum both cooled and pulled at its walls, and Janus stood, frozen in place, as if he was back in his bedroom closet, and the void would come for him if he made a sound.

Callie squealed in delight, and Janus turned to see her press her face against a glass-fronted locker.

Protect your sister, no matter what happens. Those were the last words his mother said to him.

Janus swallowed and moved quickly to the suit locker. He’d regained enough awareness to realize they were in some sort of cattle car, a way to transport livestock across the airless dust of Irkalla. Water nozzles hung from the ceiling, empty feed trays were mounted on the wall, and tie-down points had been bolted to the floor. Someone had stashed a sizeable first-aid kit next to the locker, and Janus saw oxygen and water storage in the rear right corner. We can survive this, he told himself. He opened the suit locker and slid the suits out on a rack.

Four suits were hanging from the rail. One was clearly made for a toddler, and another was his size. The remaining two were adult-sized—one man’s, one woman’s—and Janus realized these were for his parents. Maybe his mom and dad were still alive, and Uncle Ivan had gone to get them. Maybe he’d just wanted to scare Janus to get him to hurry. Janus held onto that hope.

His hand was still bleeding and hurt, although not as much as before, so Janus grabbed some biofoam from the first aid kit and sprayed it down, disinfecting and temporarily sealing it.

Then he pulled the smallest of the suits down and worked on getting Callie into it.

His little sister did not cooperate. She yowled and fought, and she tried to bite him again. It was what Janus’s father called the Invarian temper, although Janus’s mother and her brother, Uncle Ivan, insisted there was no such thing. Janus knew he had a bit of his mother’s fire, too, and he used it now to wrangle his sister into the suit, and thanked the void Callie was still wearing training diapers so he didn’t have to figure out how to hook up that part of the equipment. He closed and tightened all the connectors, connected her to the canister’s air supply, and locked her helmet.

The two-year-old glowered at him through her helmet visor.

“It’s only until Uncle Ivan comes back,” Janus told her, although she couldn’t hear him inside the sealed suit.

He hurried to take his coveralls off and get into the suit that was his size.

He almost made it. He had two legs and an arm in when a burst of sharp clacks and showers of sparks filled the container. He reached for his throat in panic as the void snatched the breath from his lungs, overbalanced, and tripped over his boots.

Janus slammed into the container floor. He felt the vibration and the sharp pain in his shoulder, but there was no sound. His head flopped to the side. He stared at his sister, at the flashing display, at the line of ping-pong ball-sized holes that had been punched into the container door. His throat ached, and his vision was blurry. His eyes rested on the shape of his sister’s suit, but she couldn’t help him. I should have taken care of myself first, he realized in that last moment of consciousness.

It was the death that waited for every Irkallan from birth. It lurked a single mistake away to punish the thoughtless and the ignorant.

He was blind, deaf, and dying when gauntleted hands lifted him and pressed an emergency mask to his face.