by Ren Warom
Grabbing the handle, Stark turns it and pushes with all his might, crying out as it slams open and dazzling lights sear his eyes. Shadowing dazed eyes, blotched with after-images like half-exposed photographs, Stark walks in to the glare, narrowing his gaze to slits. The long throat of a steep, narrow stairwell spirals on and on into liquid shadow. Its rail and risers aren’t quite as rotten as those on the cavern stairs, steel still visible through portions of rust, but the distance is twice as deep. The light flicks off, a shuttered eye.
Bone elbows in beside him, triggering the light to flash back on and illuminate the abyss. “Fuck!” he snaps, blinking and gritting his teeth. Points with a shaking finger. “Down there?”
Stark grins at his tone. It’s the twin of his horrified reluctance in the cavern. “You got a problem with heights or something?”
“I fucking hate them.”
“I can only apologise, brother. We do indeed go down there, but gently does it.” He turns to take in the whole team. “Well-spaced and soft-footed. Be on your guard, all of you. You can turn your torches off. If we keep moving, that light will stay on.”
The reverberation of feet on steel follows them loud as an avalanche as they make their way down under the brash yellow light. Fine, reddish dust billows up around them, falling in a continuous stream through the risers. By the time they reach the bottom, they’re smeared head to toe, dust transformed to thick paint by sweat, despite the chill in the dank air. They’re in a cramped stairwell, lit by muddy green light, and face a single emergency exit door emblazoned with the GyreTech logo, faded to a cracked blur.
“GyreTech?” Suge frowns.
“Probably their portion of the sewer,” Stark says. “Fucking mega-corps have to scribble over everything they own.”
A smaller logo sits beneath GyreTech’s, reduced to a few hints of circular reddish-brown lines against the dirty blue of the door. Bone rubs a finger over it, frowning. “Wonder what this was?”
“Allocation number? All these corridors will be numbered if they’re owned.”
Stark’s not interested because it doesn’t matter. Not now. They’ve come in the right direction, he’s sure of it, and impatient as he is with all these fucking obstacles, he’s determined to keep pushing on. There’s little time to waste. He assesses the door. It’s sealed from the outside with large metal straps, so corroded their edges crumble in Stark’s hands.
“Let’s get these off.”
It takes them long minutes, using the long, reinforced butts of their torches as levers, to pull the metal bands off rusted bolts, working them to and fro till they snap or fall loose. The only obstacle after that is the fact that the door’s locked from the inside.
“Someone really doesn’t want us down here,” Bone says quietly, sounding as if he’d like to oblige them.
“Screw what they want,” Stark says. “I want in. I want answers. I think they’re through here.” He bangs the door with a fist.
Tress coughs, trying to wipe her face. It looks like a mask of blood. “My cosh won’t work on that son of a bitch. What do you suggest, boss?”
He considers only a moment before saying, “You may use your gun.”
Tress’s eyes flash surprise. “But, the sulphur.”
Stark shrugs. “It’s either we shoot this fucker out, or we go back.” He pulls his mask down briefly to sniff the air. “Sulphur’s not so bad down here. Just traces. Don’t know about you, sister, but I want to carry on forwards.”
Tress nods agreement. “Sure,” she says. “But you’re telling me you’re not the slightest bit concerned about going through a door someone felt needed barring on the outside when it’s locked from the fucking inside?”
“I didn’t come all this way to quit at the first hurdle,” he tells her dryly.
She raises a brow. “Strictly speaking, this is the second hurdle.”
“I love it when you’re strict,” he says, and points at the lock. “Now, blow a hole through that fucker for me.”
Tress salutes with her middle finger. “We’d best move back up the stairs a bit,” she says. “This is likely to get messy.”
From the top of the first rise, Tress takes aim and blows half the door off. The team ducks, yelling, as a hot blast of fragments and ignited sulphur gas flies backwards, debris raining across the stairs in a deafening crescendo, bouncing off skin, hair, and clothes; singeing where it lands. Stinking smoke fills the air, stinging dust-reddened eyes to tears. Stark glares at Tress.
“I said blow a hole through the lock, not blow half the fucking door off.”
“Well, at least we’re in,” she replies lightly.
The ringing song of steel fades as smoke thins to an opaque whisper upon the air. Striding out of cover, Stark pushes the remains of the door. It teeters, creaks open a few inches, and crashes down as the top hinges give way, making another cloud of choking dust. There’s a moment where, despite an urge to cough debris from aching lungs, they all cease to breathe, waiting for something to happen, but it passes, leaving them edgy, over-energised, and then Stark leaps across the threshold, with Bone and Suge following. At the rear, Tress moves on swift feet to the wall, locating a switch. With a low-level hum and buzz, the line of bulbous, caged lights above their heads attempt a flicker into life. Only a few make it, casting out soft, greenish radiance identical to the lights outside, illuminating a long corridor.
Bone frowns. “This is not a fucking sewer.”
“No shit,” says Stark, as bewildered as Bone sounds.
At the end of the corridor, Stark’s heavily strapped shoulders break through another locked door into a long, fairly wide room. Down the central line of the room, computer equipment, large screens, and strange, tall, black objects lean against one another in a mess of smashed glass and dented metals. Ranks of suspension-unit tubes line the walls. Long since empty, they’re blighted with wide blooms of thick, mottled mould pushing through a crazy paving of cracks. The team edge inside on uneasy feet. There’s a faint, putrid scent. They’ve all seen things that’d make less-exposed humans never want to see again, but something here, some taint or vapourous memory on the air, primes the nerves to full alert.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Stark mutters. “Spread out. Let’s scout fast.” He moves his mask, sniffing the air. “The extraction units are still working. Remove your masks, but keep ’em close. We can’t rely on tech this old.”
“What were they doing down here?” asks Suge, fiddling with the black units in the room’s centre.
“I don’t know,” Stark says. “Whatever it was, it either went very wrong or got shut down with extreme prejudice. Can’t have been above-board, that’s for sure.”
Checking out the suspension units on the wall with Bone, and holding a low, intense conversation, Tress speaks up, “Bone says it’s transmog.”
Stark looks at Bone. “Seriously?”
Bone nods, his eyes on the units. There’s something in his gaze that makes Stark uncomfortable. “No doubt in my mind,” Bone confirms quietly, trailing his hand along the tubes, his face rapt. “Mod history is my thing; I know it back to fucking front. These suspension units were developed for transmog research, to stabilise subjects during testing. They worked, but transmog didn’t, and the only place you find these now is on a tiny number of critical care wards.”
“This is no care ward.”
“No. It’s a gen-lab.”
“Doesn’t look old enough for transmog trials. Are you sure?”
Bone laughs softly. “These are second-generation sus units. Trials went on far longer than any publicly available reports might document. There was a fuckload of private money behind it. Someone very rich wanted transmog to work.”
Stark stares, disbelieving. “Fucking hell.”
“Yeah.”
Cracking tension from his neck, Stark says, “Burneo wanted us to see this. It’s obviously relevant to him in some way. I hope it’s nothing to do with the goddamn Rope case. I can’t
see the Notary allowing any level of investigation to continue, if so.”
“No,” Bone replies, looking at the units again, as if he can’t stop. “I imagine they wouldn’t.”
His disquiet and anger growing by the second, Stark peers closely at Bone, frowning. His face is emotionless, but there’s a fathomless look in his eyes Stark doesn’t much care for. He wonders what talk of transmog does to the mind of a man who’s never once taken a mod.
“Let’s go,” he says. “The sooner we get out of here, the happier I’ll be.”
Beyond the lab, the rest of the complex is equally disassembled. Filled with loaded silence. It makes Stark all the more determined to get to Burneo, hunt down Rope, and find the remaining victims. Because he can’t do it again. He can’t walk in on another room moments too late to change an outcome. He hasn’t got the strength. Chewing on meaty ration bars without enthusiasm, they search for a way out to the sewers on the other side, but every likely door they find is sealed and can’t be forced, not even with Tress’s gun. Her bullets ricocheting around over their heads to blow huge craters in the walls.
They’re beginning to give up hope and consider a backtrack when Bone finds the elevator to the holding cells. Small and damp, these chambers emanate pathetic horror. In one or two, instead of the basic toilet and shelf to sleep on, there are sus units, empty again and clogged with decay. And the corridor goes on and on, cell after cell, each as small and hopeless as the last.
“There must be well over two hundred of them,” Tress whispers.
“Of course,” Bone answers. “This kind of lab runs high on test-subject mortality.”
Stark exhales hard, uncomfortable with too much talk. The place makes him feel filthy. “Just keep moving.”
Tress opens her mouth to respond, her eyes bright with outrage, but Suge, up ahead and scouting in the cells, calls out, “There’s something here.”
They follow his voice to a cell containing a large suspension chamber, heavily fortified with steel bands, the top secured with a thick, lockable seal. Its glass tube is perhaps the only one in the whole facility still filled with fluid, whey-coloured in the torch light, and cloudy, floating with scraps of white material fine as lace. Suge points behind the chamber itself.
“There’s a door behind this thing. It’s almost invisible.”
Stark runs his torch over the tube. “Looks like they had a little security issue with whatever they kept here,” he says. “Let’s see if we can move this beast.”
Suge grasps the unit’s base. It moves easily, sliding outward with barely a squeak and revealing a heavy door built flush to the wall. Suge turns a large, inset handle to send four rods sliding backwards, one after the other, with dull, clanking thuds. Behind the unit door lies a narrow corridor with a steep downwards gradient. A rank sweat of moisture leaches from the walls, collecting in shallow puddles on the ground beneath their feet. The smell of sulphur, long since lost to them in the lab, begins to drift back in. Stark pulls his mask back into place, nods at his team to follow suit, and sets off down the endless incline, his feet splashing up foul waters. Walking blind, they exit without realising. One moment walls, the next, an echoing void of black. Torchlight illuminates in flaring bands a room identical to the first room they found, furnished with banks of mobile computers, black units, and screens, undamaged here, but long since useless––clogged with sulphur residue and grime. Tress peels off to look for lights, but the switch she finds produces nothing, so instead, they spread out to sweep with torchlight. Bone takes the near side, his light raking over and up the first of the suspension unit tubes. When he catches sight of what’s inside, he makes a low, helpless sound of distress.
“What?” Stark says, coming over and playing his torch where Bone did. He nearly falls on his arse, too, when he sees what it illuminates.
In the tube, staring out through ragged holes that were once eyes is the rotting remnant of a corpse, lying slumped against the side of the tube on a slick of blackened matter, thick and dark as an old scab. Despite the wasting and warping of time, the brown relic of its skull is intact, the jaw gaping as if to loose a scream. What lies beneath can’t be classified. Nothing but a twisted maze of broken, yellowing bones and scraps of leathery muscle and skin, bound mummy-like about a network of warped metals. The broken residue of what might be a hand is splayed flat against the glass before that mass of curdled flesh and rusted steel. It doesn’t look like an attempt to escape. It looks like a plea, a mute appeal for mercy.
Stark steps to one side and moves his torch along. “There’s more,” he says, and his jaw trembles with rage. Shock. Disgust.
Similar remains are dotted about the sixteen or so suspension units down the room’s length. Nine corpses in all. Only remnants remain comprehensible within the whole, a limb here, a hand there, a section of torso. The rest is almost whimsically altered, twisted and malformed. Remade so far from human that Stark and his hardened team struggle to control the workings of throat and stomach.
“Any ideas for time of death?” Stark says to Bone.
Bone shakes his head. “These tubes are full of hairline cracks. Damp and toxic air leaking in at differing rates make it impossible to pinpoint ratios without proper tests. Even with the tests, I couldn’t give you anything like accuracy.”
Suge, gone to scout along the recesses at the far side after staring in mute horror at the remains in the tubes, yells out hoarsely, “Boss!”
“What?” Stark calls, dreading the answer.
“More here, boss. At least, I think so.”
In three tubes tucked at the end of the room are conundrums of flesh. Puzzles. Too many limbs and too many heads oddly combined, as if several subjects had been forced together and interwoven with no regard for form or function. Nothing but an amorphous meshing of parts. Nightmares made real and frozen into positions of awful contortion, as if trying to tear their separate parts asunder, fully aware of their predicament.
“Who the fuck does this?” Tress snarls out, clutching her torch, her eyes blinking and blinking, wet with tears. Rage more than distress, but both keenly felt. Her heart has always been tender, it’s why they get along. So is his.
“Mother fucking GyreTech Military Branch,” Bone says, radiating fury like heat. “This is an adjunct lab for Notary-funded military contracts. You wouldn’t believe the shit they fund. I could’ve been Mort at one of these. Got a request from GyreTech based on my first year Science results. Luckily, my dad was Chief-Mort and he wanted me elsewhere. It’s the only time I’ve ever been glad of his meddling. All Morts do in these hellholes is autopsy ruined bodies trying to work out where the science went wrong.” He shakes his head hard. “Not my fucking bag at all.”
“Think Burneo knew we’d end up here?” Tress asks Stark.
“I reckon so,” he answers, feeling sick. “Though how it connects is beyond me at the moment, if it does.”
Bone slams a fist into his thigh. “Fuck! I should’ve realised.”
“What?”
“Some labs remove mods to have a clear baseline for testing,” Bone says. “Not all of them, it’s not always required. But it looks like they were trying to meld transmog with implant-tech here …”
“So, they would’ve had to,” finishes Stark. “Meaning Rope is likely to be directly commenting on this shit, meaning he is connected to this lab, which is a pain in the goddamned arse.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, almost too tired to bear it. “Well, I sure as shit can’t tell the Notary about this. We all know what’ll happen, then. They’ll shut us down and have their Monks deal with Rope. Let every one of his victims die just to keep it under wraps.”
He looks at his team and sees a growing sense of yearning to be back in sunlight that matches his own. The horror in this room is sticky, fetid, and clinging as old sweat. They need to refocus, to be reminded why they’re here. “Whatever he was: lab assistant, surgeon, or subject, it doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. We still need to stop the cunt. Th
ere are people counting on us to save them.”
“Then lead us the hell out of here,” Tress snaps, brittle as sulphur.
The way out is an incoherent tangle of false ends, loops, and curlicues designed to fool the wanderer. It makes them anxious, disorientated. Provokes swells of nausea and the nascent throbs of impending headaches. Even following the unmistakable scent of sulphur, and with Suge’s expert eyes to lead them, it takes over two hours to find the way back into the sewers, lightless and drained of all but the merest slick of water. Stark and Suge take point, then, Bone behind them, with little Tress, huge gun held ready to fire beneath her torch, taking the rear. The sulphur’s too strong to fire it, but no one’s going to tell her to put it away. Not now. They’re all on edge, all need something to cling to, to make them feel secure.
This part of the sewer is a back route of intersection points with multiple outlets, some small, others positively massive, ranging overhead and to the left of the team. It’s featureless but for these exit holes, and seems to continue on forever, the echo of waters filling it with murmurings like far away voices, the resemblance perfect and disconcerting. Above that, only the splash of feet can be heard, the occasional sharp intake of Bone’s breath as his torchlight illuminates rat eyes.
“We’re getting nowhere,” Suge exclaims, frustration colouring his every word.
Stark claps a hand on his shoulder. “I can smell the sulphur clean through my mask. We’re close.”
They follow the tunnel farther for an hour or so, until it turns an abrupt right corner into a vast, echoing chamber, filled with watery music. Up ahead, there’s a line of huge, circular outlets. As they approach these outlets, the reek of sulphur blows with such strength, they begin coughing. Stark holds out a hand to halt the team. He chooses the middle outlet, suspecting they all lead to the same place, and walks in alone, the sound of his feet echoing loud in his ears. He only goes far enough to see the yawning breadth of the cavern beyond the outlet’s exit, and then turns back, his face flushed with triumph.