"This is command." Leargam said and gestured about them. "Most of its the auditorium you already been in. The rest is all mangerial. Sterile, stuffy offices. Company shills. Our tech is tucked away in a Womb somewhere. Armory's that way."
"Why wasn't I told any of this before?"
"New arrivals are restricted to observation levels until two days time." Leargam said and led him through the archway of the corridor that led to the armory. "Then you go on response duty. Then you get a weapon. Then you get suited up. You understand where I'm headed."
Tezac nodded and said, "A head start."
The gate that looked massive at the terminus of the long hallway grew larger still as they approached. The thick blast doors were marked 'Armory', white paint over red, and took in the dimensions of the wall. Leargam went to the sensor array embedded on either side of the interlocking center and admitted himself to the electronic eyes of one form or another, of one sight or another.
Thus he stepped back from the scanners and their hardlight console flashed a bright blue before the doors groaned open, sliding into the walls. Pale faces and hunched shoulders tumbled out its ingress like stones let loose into a river, held feebly at bay by the dam that takes only a little push if a little push was ever given. They made for tired greetings and paid no attention to the newcomer behind the old guard.
"Armory's all here," Leargam said amid the buzz of all the noise of the huge, alive place.
Tezac watched the next shift step into the supply daises and then as the arms of the machine snatched them up roughly by their limbs. They showed no signs of having noticed. Not even as the hundreds of spindly struts sprouted from their draping feet and went to work at fitting their exo-suits to them. Differences there were among them, but they all dropped when all was done back to the metal of the platform on legs of pliable stone. Used to the storms that come, not caring when they had gone - never truly leaving.
"Come on, you piece of junk." Leargam said as he fought with the console of one of the outfitter-machines.
"Please state designation." It said and he repeated it loudly and thumped its display pedastal.
The thing whirred to life and took him into its manifold grip with a vengeance and thanked him for his passcode. The earth moved beneath the metal at his feet and did not stop until the tiny manipulators grew from the parting floor of the dais as so many blades of grass. The only kind on Cocytus. His armor was partitioned throughout their many hands as crickets the meadow. Tezac leaned against the wind that blew against him only.
"Should have retired this unit years ago." Leargam said to him. "I swear it's older than me. I do."
Leargam dropped to the dais in full raiment. The scaffolding of the exo-suit clacked against itself as he stepped down from the platform and gestured for Tezac to take his place, the servo-motors of its joints whirring as both leg and arm moved. It appeared not to be much, and less so to any being that never laid eyes on such a thing. But he knew the hole that could develop in a man or any flesh-based creature that came into contact with the fist of him who wore it. He had seen it. He had done it.
"Have at it." The old man said.
Tezac brushed past him and mounted one foot upon the dais and the other would not go until he made it to go. His boots fell hollow onto the cold steel of the platform and resounded against the emptiness that lay beneath. It seemed to him that he was already shut in and had already been again imprisoned. He navigated the hardlight console of the outfitter-machine and saw that his fingers shook as they went along the interface and prompted the mainframe that a new user had arrived at one of its satellite gates.
"Please state designation." Its voice said to him, sad. Itinerant in some hidden way.
"Tezac Hotchkins," He said. "Enforcer Code: 51322970608."
"Thank you, Enforcer Hotchkins, and welcome to Cocytus: Penal World and Colony for over 5 million inmates. Owned and operated by: Arbitronix United." It said to him. "Arbitronix United: maintaining discipline across the galaxy. Do enjoy your stay, and we know you will do your duty."
He waited rigid and silent as the arms unfurled from the pylons of the supply dais and closed in around him. He looked nowhere but forward, into the shadows that clung to the far wall of the long armory, and did so even as the cold metal clamped round his wrists and his ankles and lifted him from the earth. The air ceased to flow, and was not so cold anymore. Sweat ran down his side. The world closed in on him. It became something he must escape, but he did not know to where. There was nowhere to go but inward, puncturing a hole within oneself and watching oneself dissolve into it. Absent from the pressures that enclosed from everywhere.
All the years spent in small spaces and amongst even smaller company rushed to meet him from where he had abandoned them. The many and miniature hands bore up the components of his exo-suit from the storage cylinder beneath and in their approach, slow and purposeful it seemed to him, he felt the urge to vomit up the nothing in his stomach. He saw in them the self-contained prison, the living to fight and fighting to live. No rest, no sleep. No taste of bread, nor water. The always of bloodshed, and pain known but not felt. The chemical horror that had released him in ruins.
A tunnel came into his mind and all of it that was not a shadow was a blur, and so eschewed by him. It was the image at the end of it that he desired, a portal into a distant place that was only such as all things are in paralysis - one form or another. He saw through the bright frame of that else place and beyond his bed and upon his bed, his luggage. It was his comfort and he wanted to go there, but he couldn't. He wanted to struggle, but he could not. These dual worlds held him at their arms' length, considerable and the pull powerful. A fugue place took him into itself, held him in an oblivion of everything. A celestial body caught in the competition of its equal betters and moving only when they moved. Their energies, insurmountable of one another, demolishing him slow at his core. But then the mechanical limbs released him and he fell to his knees upon the dais and stood slowly.
A rack ejected from the hardlight console's pedastal that stood before him and within it was a rifle. He took it and thus it was his, as all things are that are truly owned. There was a pinch in his left hand as he gripped the underbarrel of the gun and its display trilled at him, flashing rapidly from along the stock.
"Biological sample taken," His helmet said to him. "Arbitronix Firearm 32-7785b registered to Enforcer Hotchkins. Please use responsibly and accurately; remember: haste makes waste."
"Look at you," Leargam said and thumbed the key to retract his visor and placed another chem-stick between his lips. "Sleek, clean bad ass."
"How long will that last." Tezac said and looked at his gloved hands, the skeletal brackets of the enhancement overlay.
"Ain't that the question." Leargam said and started away toward the door. "Come on, let's not keep our guests waiting. Tram's on the floor below us."
They waded from out of desolation and into abundance. The ghosts of the pre-dawn shifts streamed out of the return magrail lines and into the port by the hundreds and so swamped the massive second level of headquarters. He and the old man had found brief isolation, Tezac knew, and solitude and inside so short an interim. The human element of what had before seemed a wasteland of automation and its captive audience to the whole cruel play had then become apparent. And it unfolded across a dozen different sectors and in a dozen different quarters. Each dwarfed by the movements of those anthills which toiled beneath their hives. Of it all, he was only a small part and across time smaller still. Leargam took him by the arm.
"What's the matter," He said. "This can't be any big deal after the war."
"It wasn't like this. Not like now." He said and wanted to return to his room, where his luggage in his mind had been transmitted to his bed.
"Well come on. Tram's over there, you see it? The one we came in on." Leargam said and pointed out the hulk of steel that idled behind the polymer windows on the far side of the magrail port, beyond those hundreds returning
and departing. The heavy snowfall nearly blurred out the '7' stencilled huge and white on the side of it.
"Let's go then." Tezac said and shrugged off his grip.
So they delved into the sea of metal and grime and sweat before them. Those oncoming moved from their path like wheat does the wind, swaying away from those they felt rather than saw. It was the lift that called them and they would not divert their eyes from it for fear that once out of sight it would vanish as so many things had.
The howl of the wind and the break of ice crystals on the floor-to-ceiling glass became audible above the dull roar of the crowds, the living stamp of their boots. The threshold of the tram loomed before them and they merged into the peopled stream that issued into it. The storm outside beat against the umbilical that adhered tram to station and Tezac gazed out from its small portholes at the quagmire of steel and fumes that sat as a splotch upon the icy landscape, harried ever by the winter throes of the winter planet. Beyond the glacial hills the plains rolled to the distant and spare mountains that hosted their own metal parasites, in turn their own ecosystems of mineral extractrion. Then they were gone, behind him now as he boarded the tram with the swell of those there as well.
He stood as Leargam sat and held fast to the support pole as the car started ahead into the snow and ice. The talk was muted. The talk that there was. He could smell the gun oil exuded by their rifles, done that morning. Some pre-dawn ritual that he himself had once known. The electrical stench of the servo-motors of their armor, the harsh whir when a few moved such joints. The groanings of old, worn down things speaking for their owners, constant reminders of another tired day and what would be another tired day out. But the tram ran on and smoothly – without fault for anything.
Day 4
The great olive drab of the blast doors opened before them and groaned beneath the groan of the storm being unveiled. They stepped through before the gate was not yet fully into the walls and appeared to those beyond as shadows in the swell of light that crept through the widening gulf. Modern beasts combing the ancient ruins of an antique kind. They shouldered their rifles and keyed for their visors to lower against the cold that blew into the hangar from those of its doors opened to it. Leargam swatted him on the shoulder and pointed off to that which was marked '12'. The figures there, dark against the light of the world outside, hailed and went to meet them.
"What do we got?" Leargam said through the helmet's vocal broadcaster.
"Standard patrol vessel," The foremost of them said and Tezac knew him for Penders, the man who had transmitted to them in the mess hall. "Outerverse border detail. 30, 50 guys."
"Where are they?"
"They won't leave the landing pad. Or that cargo they're carrying."
The old man nodded and looked around their group at the indistinct shapes stood on the platform ahead and said, "What is it?"
"Your problem." Penders said and patted Leargam on the shoulder and pushed past the two of them, his posse following close behind in chuckles.
"Not a lot of comraderie around here." Tezac said once they had gone.
"Penders is always a prick. Always been a prick. Probably born a prick." The old man said and started away toward the landing pad. "His father, too."
"And his father?"
"Godsdamned right. He thinks he ain't beholden to anybody except command; little does he know: that's why command doesn‘t fucking like him."
"So what the hell was he doing here?"
"Making nice with all the other assholes that aint beholden to anybody but command." He said and stopped short of the broad hangar bay marked '12' before them. "Hangar personnel."
"You Leargam?" A squat man in thick welder's goggles asked Tezac and the old man beside him grinned his pearly grin. As though he had summoned the man by mention of him.
"Hotchkins," He said and pointed with his rifle. "He's Leargam."
"You took damn long enough. Any more and the instruments would have started freezing over. Conduits bursting, flaps icing up." He said and took a dirty shammy cloth from his belt and wiped with it his dirty face. "Ah, to hell with it. There's your man anyway."
Leargam looked past him at the platform for a second time and still the storm occluded the outside world with white. But through the ice and wind and snow he could make out the tall, broad shape that was grey-black in the colourless nothing which swirled around it.
"Don't see anybody apart from the soliders, guy." Leargam said. "And that thing they're all standing around."
"He's there alright." The man said and brushed past him. "I got work to do. Just make it quick, alright? Or the-"
"The instruments will freeze over." Leargam said. "Yeah I got you."
"You'd think they didn't want anybody to take him." He went on in the absence of the machinist. "I'll be fucked if we ever get this guy out of here if all those soliders want to give the long and short of it too."
"Something isn't right." Tezac said and did not go ahead with him toward the wall of the blizzard.
"You mean my suit'll freeze up before we get back to our post?" Leargam said and his words began to be smothered by the howl of the wind the further he went before he saw that the rookie had not followed him. "Well what the hell do you mean?"
"That guy," He said. "You don't talk like that if you got some place to be. I saw it dozens of times in the wars."
"We aren't in the SepSecs here." The old man said and studied Tezac's face as he said nothing of it. "What're you thinking, then?"
"I think that thing out there on the pad with them is an obelisk." He said. "And you'd better be careful about what's inside."
Leargam eyed him and then turned away and brought his wristband round. Tezac watched him manipulate its hardlight screen impassively and then stared out into the flurries at the hardly there figure of the black containment tower therein. Indeed, he peered at it and peered beyond it and so searched the most darksome of what his mind had chosen to remember.
"Yeah," He heard the old man say into his bracer. "This is Leargam. Down in the hangar bays. Enforcer Code: 23900541212. Connect me with Captain Mullins. No I won't wait. It's important. Tell him a military vessel has docked with his containment sector and he'd probably like to know why."
Leargam fell to muttering to himself and keyed off the transmission and joined Tezac again far back from the open bay doors, the soldiers yet waiting beyond.
"Captain Mullins is already aware." Leargam said. "Cleared the transfer himself this morning. Shit. They have their own facilities for this."
"I can tell you that your captain didn't have much choice."
"Well," Leargam said and keyed his visor to lower again.
They went away at last to the threshold of the landing pad and beyond it the soliders stood yet as stoic as statues left in some bygone palace to weather what they will. They stirred at their approach as waking temple guardians and one stepped apart to hail them. Bulky as they in his exo-suit, but self-contained and immune to the harrying elements. Tezac and Leargam drew to a stop before him, ramshackle in ramshackle suits and so much the primitive visited by a long absent progenitor.
"Morning," He said, distorted through the sealed helmet, and he then looked about himself as the ice crystals broke across his visor. "Least I think it's morning."
"Close enough." Leargam said to the giant. "What you got for us?"
"Maerazian." The man said and took his trigger hand away from it and held the palm out to them, prompting the holoprojector bulb therein to broadcast.
Tezac looked at Leargam out from the corner of his eye and the old man did the same, the one knowing and the other knowing that he did.
"Zhouferon Zhoudai," The soldier said to him. "Height: 3.2 meters; weight: 138 kilos. Age: unknown."
"Your gene scanners didn't pick that up?" Leargam shouted over the storm.
"Returned as unquantifiable."
"So he's an old one."
"Captain thinks Exodux Age, but he hasn't been thinking too straig
ht since we picked him up." He shouted back. "Listen, I hate to drop him off on you. But you guys are the only slam in a few dozen AU and we just don't have the containment facilities on board. About wasted all our sedatives just getting him here. And we had a lot of sedatives."
"When can we expect a pick-up?"
"Two, three weeks tops. Core-standard. Captain said there's a Magi vessel nearby that can take him. But we'll see how that pans out."
"Alright," Leargam said and nodded and looked off at the monstrous Obelisk. "I sure hope it does; we only got the one cell that'll hold the son of a bitch."
"Don't worry. Somone'll be along." He said. "We got to lift off before this storm gets any worse like the sensors are reporting. Good luck!"
"Yeah," Leargam said, but did not watch the squad file back into their dropship; his eyes remained fast to the monolith before them, one of a different sort hidden inside, until he turned back to Tezac. "Alright. Let's get this beast hooked up and hauled out of here."
Day 4
"These are the levels they don't tell you about in the briefing." Leargam said.
Tezac nodded as the lift plunged and whined into the engulfing dark of the shaft hidden beyond the walls. They flanked the Obelisk like excavators having hauled out some alien relic from the bowels of a dead world, for indeed that is what the machine appeared to those unaccustomed to it. And what resided within, beyond their ken. A retinue of men stood behind them and wrapped round the rear of it and one of these leaned forward to touch him on the shoulder.
"First drop?" He said and Tezac nodded.
"Here." He said. "Plenty of atmospherics."
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