The man smiled and said, "You're in for a real treat when we get to the bottom," and then withdrew back into formation.
The subsurface kilometers ticked fast and upwards of 30 on the readout of the hardlight console until at last the lift hummed to a halt at 52. The doors remained shut against them and so Leargam thumbed the hardlight button that would open them, again when they did not.
"Please state designation." The console said at last and turrets lowered of a sudden from hatches in the elevator's ceiling, training themselves methodically and in turn upon all those before them.
Leargam submitted his code as he had done not so long ago to the Enforcer-Captain's assistant and its blue light thrummed orange, brightening slow and dimming fast as with everything in the world that lay far above.
"Designation accepted." It said. "Alpha wave brain pattern correlated. No preservative bodies found. Welcome to Cocytus Penal World Subterrenean Specialized Containment and Isolation, Enforcer Leargam. Enjoy your stay."
The console chimed and the turrets recoiled and the doors opened to admit a gust of air a degree warmer than those that whirled above. They filed out and the Obelisk with them, its self-guided treads processing the data of the NervLink cables that ran between they and it. It was a heavy silence that greeted them on the walkway beyond. Only the buzz of the containment tower disrupted it, and their booted feet. Tezac looked up at the ceiling that was strewn with interminable doors, to each only a thin strip of glass to see within or without, and then at the distant walls which held the same.
"Gods it's hot down here." He said.
"Outside those walls it's a thousand degrees." Leargam said and pointed off into the shadows that surrounded them. "Give or take. Not that it matters at those temperatures. Geothermal core oughta be around here some place. Powers the whole sector, pays for itself. Go figure, all the noise that it's making."
A bright light fell on them of a sudden and blinded them in dispelling the darkness of that deep tomb. Their reactive visors dimmed the incoming rays and all could see plain the barreled arms of a turret flanking the spotlight. It beeped sequentially and then droned at them and those behind flinched at the noise.
"Hey, boys. You caught me in my midafternoon nap." A voice called from somewhere in the darkness and cleared its throat. "What brings you to the land of death and stagnation?"
"Zirdat." Leargam said and nodded at the turret, squinting still into the light of its flaring eye. "How's business?"
"Teddy Leargam. I haven't seen your mug down here in a while. Who's that big guy you got with you?"
"Rookie, just shipped in. Is there even a midafternoon to have naps in down here?"
"I manage; it's all in the mind, my friend." He said and yawned. "So what do you got for me?"
"New inmate." He said, staring up into the light and the dark that hovered close around it. "Just in, straight to sub-level iso. No downtime."
"Null-grav?" He said and the light swivelled up to rest on the tanks inset throughout the vast chamber and then down to illimunate rows of metal cylinders below the walkway that had before only been hinted at by the dim light of the overhead lamps. "Or the nightmare tubes?"
"The shaft." Leargam said.
"The shaft." He said and there was a pause in which the light of the turret maneuvered to fall on the containment obelisk behind them. "Well shit. What the hell did you bring me that needs to be put in there?"
"Full sense-dep." He said. "Mag-con. Maerazian, maybe a warlord. Who knows."
"That's some cargo you brung me." Zirdat said and sucked his teeth. "Well fuck. Alright, keep him coming."
"You'll take him off our hands, then?" Leargam asked.
"Got to." He said and they heard the shrug in his voice and then the turret swivelled out from their way and shined upon them from the emptiness beside the walkway. "As much as it'd be interesting to see you put him in with the rest of those animals up there, I'm sure there's a regulation or two that would nail my ass to the wall."
So they moved forward into the gloom and escorted by the rail-turrets, servants of a god of a redundant underworld. Tezac saw as he looked about himself the guardsmen behind him doing the same. But in the way that he had seen men do in unfamiliar jungles or canyons or ruined metropolises. Hoping that, in searching, something would not appear.
Their way soon revealed the platformed heart of the processing center that sprawled beneath Cocytus, a contiguous fungus that housed the means of its own construction. There the light was best and shone down on them from above through white discs, so much the eyes of their builders. At its center was only a life, amidst all the machines and facilities which operated and maintained the thousands of isolated prisoners. Simple, not small nor large, and of no great magnificence tandem to that of the prisoners it had been built to send below. And in its simplicity was the thing that kept all wary men at bay.
They peered up at the groups of loading scaffolds that were the arms of the installation. Standing silent and ready to withdraw any number of the cells above and all around to deposit them again, loaned out. He wondered how many of them were occupied and what insanity could come that should fill all of them. He wondered more at the silos below, cast into the pit of wiring and conduits that too fell away into an unknown blackness.
"Bring it over to the lift." Zirdat said. "Watch your heads."
A hatch squealed open in the dark high above them and out of it issued the low hum of carbon-fiber wings and afterward a squadron of drones lowered down into view, their manipulator arms grasping at nothing as they formed up around the monolith. In their wake Leargam and Tezac started forward and the obelisk trailed after them, pulling along those who accompanied them from behind. No one wanted part in the plunge ahead and in such a mode of descent that vaunted hidden meaning. But onward they went and their shoulders squared, their rifles high.
The treads of their cargo whirred to a halt at the epicenter of the open-air elevator at the center of the platform and its ferryman were quick to disengage the nervelink cables from their suits and step away. A tetrad of turrets rose from hatches in the floor and trained themsevles on the machine that towered amidst them. A crisp, sweet smell came into their nostrils but only the soldier and the miner among them knew its source. It was clear to them who understood that there was little in all the theorized Mulitverse that could withstand Teredium rounds fired at such capacities. That the radiant crystal's explosions would detonate the finances of him who purchased it no less than its target.
"You're set to take him down yourself, then?" Leargam said to the man behind the drones that had lowered down into view. "He's still sedated in that thing, but I'd go quick taking him out."
"He won't be any trouble." Zirdat said. "Nothing my goons can't handle. Go on, I'll see you all at Suzie's later."
Day 4
Their boots rang against the grated catwalk and those other guards they passed either standing or walking nodded to them, they in return. The masses of prisoners surged over one another below in a confused mess of sweat and grease and buried rage. It was a silent storm, ever brewing. Ever looming. They looked to the turrets that hovered above each time insult begged injury and grew into a commotion only for so long as it took the machines to remind them of the rules in their dry and mechanical voices. But somewhere, hidden down in the tangle of human lives, Tezac in his short time knew already the presence therein of human atrocity.
"There's not enough room to even stand on your own." He said.
"They find ways," Leargam said. "Look around; you'll see them sometimes. The stronger ones making chairs out of the weaker ones here. The gangs blocking up space there. Always fun when they start another pushing war. You know, for breathing room."
"What's your auto-target setup?" Tezac asked and they drew up to the door of the next pod.
"We were using vitals," Leargam said and scanned his bracer and the doors slid open and they waited for the guards beyond to pass through. "But that tended to get messy fast. So
mebody has a too big a STIM dose and their heart blows up, everybody around him could kiss their asses goodbye along with him. Then command switched to substance scans to look for weapons and sudden bone fractures or blood loss and it's worked pretty well since. Every now and then we get a few incidents. Strokes of genius, but nothing we can't handle."
Tezac nodded. It was the same elsewhere. All over and for all peoples. New ecosystems had developed. Alien solutions to alien problems. Deals brokered and silent wars waged for the small boon of standing free amid a swamp of people too deep to probe. And how little it mattered, he thought. Here or a manufactory planet in Corporate SlaveSec, what was the difference. Even in the Galactic Core. Necessity could find no greater home than in them. Doing what could be done to temper the hell that had been contrived for them, for such as it is with hells. The power to dispell them is reserved for him who created it, and those like him. But never those condemned to it. It was a thing that he knew, and was sure that he knew and had learned above all others. The only thing. The only reward for a lifetime spent in battle.
"Is every holding tower this crowded?" He said as they crossed into the next courtyard.
"Here, yeah." Leargam said and formed up alongside him. "Sector 7 is low priority. We get the dregs, the flunkies, the goons. The boots on the ground sort."
"And we got the warlock."
"Well," Leargam said. "Any fuck-up happens cause of somebody else's."
"They're all human," Tezac said as he looked over the inmates below. "Looks like mostly Corist, even."
"All of em." Leargam said. "Every last scum-sucking piece of trash in this heap."
"They can't all be. Not every courtyard."
"Tower 7's Blackblood turf. Well the turf we gave em anyway. They don't mingle with the Outerverse cons except on work detail and we keep that shipshape, you believe me."
"I didn't think there was that many. Here, I mean."
"Oh, it's just a number til you see it. But you know that." Leargam said and Tezac looked at him. "Just wait til you see the Jedezians' tower."
An alarm sounded loud from overhead and there was the stamp of feet as the inmates below arrayed themsevles at attention and into ranks. The great doors upon the wall just beneath the walkway opened and slid into the walls. Tezac went to the railing and looked out over the assembled masses before him. There were only a few that peered back up at him and not for long. Casting their eyes to their boots as soon as they met his.
"You know," He said. "I never thought I'd see it like this."
"Midday consumption." A voice said over the loudspeaker, tired. Without tone. "Midday consumption. Move out. Midday consumption."
The marching steps of a hundred formations across as many courtyards resounded throughout Tower 7 and the men below swarmed into the huge lifts that awaited them there and were so swallowed into the bowels of the beast of which he was a part. The prisoners drained away as so much waste let loose from a canal lock and they went on upon the walkway, through to the next pod and saw the same in the courtyard below.
"That's us too." Leargam said. "And that's it. First day on patrol is out. We report back to the observation booth at core standard evening. Once these assholes return from labor. By then we won't have to do much to pacify em. Tezac?"
He stood still just outside the doorway of the chamber they had crossed into and stared off into the distance beneath them. Leargam went to the railing and followed where he looked and saw there a tangle of limbs and the heavy leathers and ratty wool of prisoner uniform. He keyed the switch on his helmet for his visor to lower and activated its zoom function and then at once turned away. A puppet of flesh that had been a man, lying as limp and lifeless - but for the motions of the men it sprawled between.
"Hey," Tezac shouted down at them; but they only looked back up at him. Their bodies moving independently of their attentions.
He raised his rifle at them and still they did not stop. It was only that same dull look. That empty glare, that which saw only the source of a sound and none of its maker. That had been diverted only by a new utterance, a new sight, that had not been present a moment thence. The next in queue for registration, reflexively taken stock of. They went on and it seemed they would indeterminably until he fired upon them. A spray of gunfire broke across the wall behind them and they scattered. Animals rooted out of the underbrush. Scavengers away from the corpse of a friend, all taken and even what remains in a decent death.
Day 4: Night
The cold ploughed down through the streets of the town, empty but for Enforcers like them, and its agents filled the gutters with snow and ice and misery. Night had fallen, and it was only the regulators of their suits that kept the feeling in their fingers. The inhabitants of that sorry place, huddled about the prison walls and without any luxury but the worst kind, had long been driven inside. Beyond the neon flood that the comers strove through, where they were needed for the needs of those without.
They stood beneath the silver glow of a sign that read 'Susie's' and the doors opened and the music that had been only a muffled drone hit them hard. They went in past the bouncers that stopped up the short, snug corridor and into the gloom that lay between the light of the bar and the light of the stage. They walked beside it and stole glances at the girls dancing there and the little parts of them that were covered. Smoke rose from chem-sticks, drinks spilled, and table after table of Enforcers laughed silent below the great noise as they studied the products displayed.
Leargam pointed out a table near the back and Tezac nodded at him and so they went over to it. They removed their greatcoats and slung them over the backs of the chairs. The old man said something to him and then shouted it when he could not hear and after many repitions threw up his hands and made for the bar that stood off to the side of the stage. Tezac disengaged the suit's neckflaps and the plating retracted so that he might remove his helmet and he did so and laid it on the table before him. He took his seat just as Leargam had returned with some dark liquid that frothed in two heavy mugs.
"Thanks," Tezac said and took the glass handed to him.
"Best godsdamn part of the day," Leargam said and sighed as he sank into the torn leather chair beside the scratched wooden table and sipped the mug, watched intently the stage.
"What a day," Tezac said and drank deep. "What a way to end it."
"There weren't nothing we could have done for him. You smother a guy, quiet, the turrets just can't track it. We can't either. There's too damn many of them. And you'll learn. You'll learn. You spend as much time here as the rest of us, when you see a thing like that," Leargam said and waved his mug at the room around them. "This is how you cope."
"That's not it."
"Well what is it then?"
"That’s not how it should end."
"Look around, kid. You ain't in a place where things should or shouldn't happen anymore. They just happen, and mostly it's to them who had it coming." Leargam said and set his drink aside on the table and fished for a chem-stick in his vest pocket it. "You know chances are he did something to get sent out here."
"I know it." Tezac said and stared off toward the dancers upon the stage, at some distant point beyond them and they themselves only blurs. "But when I was released from the Order, I thought that was it. I thought I was out, and I wasn't going back. I’m certain everybody does. Then you ship back home - wherever it is, if it was ever home to start - and you look around and find some use for yourself outside war. So you set to it. Your mind's made up and your head's clear for the first time in a long time. And you got it all mapped out. But then it grabs you, and reels you back in."
"It?"
"It."
"Then why here?" He said and lit the chem-stick hanging from his mouth and blew out the first puff of smoke and rested it between middle and fore finger upon the arm of his chair.
"Not a lot of work to go around, if you're not a slave. Not for men like me. And with the Reclamation winding down the only Enforcer details that n
eeded hands were the ones getting new clients. So the Outerverse slams is what we got. What we all got. Both sides pushed into the same gutter."
"And you're not sitting in containment yourself; just what's left of the guys you fought."
"The war's over." Tezac said and drained his mug. "We won."
"You want back on the assault grid?" Leargam said and took a drink himself, sucked on his chem-stick. "Instead of here?"
"I could have went back in with the Merc Brigades." He said and nodded to himself as he looked out at the dancers. "Waste away in a suit until someone threw me in a revenant module. I know guys running jobs for the Outer Syndics now that drove tanks in the war. Cost more than your life's worth of paychecks. And mine. Slaving away on some backwater, just trying to survive. Get their next STIM fix to keep up with a habit they got given."
"Well, kid," He said. "You picked the worst place to get away from that life."
"There isn't no other life for me."
"Well what the hell else you good for?" Leargam said and took a swig of his ale.
The place went quiet and all went still. The dancers froze like marionettes, their strings the notes of the music. Those laughing did not laugh and the enforcers crowded around the old, dirty tables amid young and cleanly filthly prostitutes fell into that silence. Their faces dour, as if some terrible remonstrance of their own memories had come up all at once and smote them. All in that one moment of nothingness. Then the music began, the next song in line, and they lit up again and the dancers with them. Laughter, carousal. It all started once more at the beating of the noise.
"You think I'd be here if there were any mining contracts left?" He went on. "Hell, I knew it was all over the moment those ships touched down. The gig was up, and the only deep space left these days is rubbing noses with the Maerazians. Or the by-gods Petronins."
"I look around, Leargam. At these people." Tezac said. "And I think that maybe we came down on the wrong side of things."
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