"Would it have been any different?" The old man said and took a long drag on his chem-stick, squinting in the ubiquitous light that flared all around them. "Probably you'd be dead. Least you wouldn't be here. And the Concilium, well, they would've rolled into SepSec anyway and rolled on through it. Take the Order right along with them too for their trouble, and you know probably more than me how much the Citadel'd like that."
"Then I'd have died fighting. Like I was supposed to."
"There‘s nobody supposed to die fighting. They just die." He said and straightened in his chair and leaned toward Tezac and pointed at him with the fingers that bore his chem-stick. "Look, it's all going down. You and me, we're small time. Couple guys having a couple drinks in a nowhere bar on a nowhere planet. You ain't in command of the Order any more than I'm a titan of industry. And the days a man could make something of himself he wasn't born into, especially a young man, they're over. Most you can make is like me, sit back and ride the wave into obscurity as gently as possible."
Tezac set aside his drink untouched upon the table between them and got to his feet. He looked down at Leargam and then around at the jubilance that was his new world and the people in it. His new home. He wanted to visit upon it the things that he had seen and thus knew, or thought he knew by seeing them. Grab them and shake them and shout at them the thoughts and thousand pains that were expressionless for him and so he kept silent. He could not ask of them why they did not understand themselves and why it was so, for he understood none of it himself. It was a boiling, a billion molecular collisions that took place with no clear path to extrude their energies. All in a moment he had realized the other planes, lower and higher, and how immutable the walls between them were. Unconsiously he flexed his right hand and consciously felt only the constant needles.He made for the door and the cold of the town that hemmed in the walls of the prison proper and Leargam's voice called after him.
The winds met him. The ice hailed him. And he did not break his stride into the deep snows and deeper chill that went through everything and even the things that cannot be touched. His thermoregulators warmed him, though he shivered. Sweat beaded on his skin, though he was cold. His eyes wandered all over at congruencies that were only shadows. Mad marbles rolling around a mad skull. The automated plows rolled past him and he past them and found more in their silent company than he did in that which he left behind.
So it was in all those places he had walked by, cozy and cozened and to him full of laughter. Even in those places that were without windows, or without open doors though all doors be closed to him. He would have it that way; he had made it that way. A preemptory refusal. No rest, no sleep. Not tonight, not any night - for him. There was in his walk written his history. Any certain one that saw him could read it, and he made no show to hide it. For all show was facile. All show was idolatry. And so it was that a showsman among showsmen stepped from the darkened alleyway further darkened by his shadow and the shadow of the night and produced himself into Tezac's path.
"A miserable night," The man said and Tezac looked over his teardrop shape in the darkness. "Can't imagine it'll get any better on its own. You neither, by your look. What's a little edge off, huh?"
"I don't know," Tezac said and contemplated the drawers he knew to be embedded in the man's suit beneath his shabby cloak. "A few doses of Mute?"
"A few shuffles of CorpBucks." He said and withdrew his cloak from around the great artificial bulk of his stomach and keyed open the desired cryostorage chamber in the suit's abdomen. "Have you got em?"
"I've got a little. Shipped in two days ago. Haven't been paid yet."
"A little won't cover it." The man said and moved to close the tray back up into his suit again and Tezac snatched up the wrist of the hand that did it. "Let go."
"I'll give you what I got." Tezac said. "And the rest when I get it."
"I don't do loans."
"Broken bones?"
"Not in the habit." The man said in a quaver. "Alright, alright. Hand it over before someone sees from Susie's down the way."
Tezac upturned the man's wrist and scanned his wristband across his own and authorized the credit transfer and roughly took the bags from the storage tray and quit the entrance to the alley. He slid the bags into one of the deep pockets alongside his vest and forced his way through the storm and along the streets. He knew not where he was or what way led to what other and followed whichever gust blowed most powerful. He often took the sacks out from his vest again and contemplated how easy it might be to toss them into the gutter and seek out the tram station and depart from them and all that they represented together at once. But it was by their presence and his knowledge of their presence that his aimless circuits of the parasite latched onto that of the prison which had spawned it brought him to the magnetic tract binding these two cancers together.
Leargam said his goodbyes at the elevator to them that travelled back with him from Susie's and swaggered down the hall to where he knew Tezac's to be. Those in the lift were too far gone to remind him that his floor had not come up yet. He counted off the numbers stencilled beside every threshold as he went and so saw one of them to be open where he expected his to be. He referenced its number with that upon his wristband beside the rookie's picture and again and then rushed to it when he realized they were the same.
He crashed into the doorway and balanced himself upon the frame and saw in the light that streamed in from the hallway Tezac lying within it. Curled within himself, his exo-suit discarded around him and his eyes closed. Leargam stumbled into the room and slid onto his knees and cradled the man's head in his arms and checked his pulse. It went, slow and steady and quiet. He put his ear to his mouth and it was the same. A threadbare creature gone to such a place that would welcome him, unabashedly. Unreservedly.
But Leargam smacked him lightly and then harder when it did not wake him. Tezac mumbled a nothing and the old man let him gently to the floor and looked about himself to find the autohypos strewn all about them upon the floor. He picked one up and threw it away at the wall, its inset vial shattering. The light played off the empty plastic of the pouches that lay amidst them all and he took one of them up into the light and read the labelling and looked down at Tezac and let him roll off his knees. He stood up, pocketed the bag and went to the doorway. There he turned round again and looked at the man lying before him. A shell. An afterimage hours old. The substance beneath the mold. He shook his head at all the things he could not understand, all of which he could not account for and what could bring such a man to such loathsome frailties. Then the old man turned to leave.
"You can't tell anyone." He heard from behind him, slurred and forced, and he stopped.
"I won't." Leargam said over his shoulder. "Not yet. But you better get a handle on that shit before I do."
Day 5: Early Morning
"What'll you take?" Naeus said.
"No, man." Said Girda and waved the offer away.
"Come on. I'll hedge you 100 CorpBucks that they kicked him to death." Naeus pursued and Girda stopped and gave him a look. "200 more they had fun with him."
"Make it 200 on the first and that they stabbed him and you've got a deal." Girda said and they halted before the isolated cell and he activated his helmet's transciever. "Open cell 614."
"That's a lot of money."
"You want a go in the back with that hotsie-totsie at Suzie's you better put it up and hope I'm wrong." Girda said and glanced at him, back at the door. "Gate's opening."
"Godsdamn it; alright, you ingrate. Alright. You're on." He said and pointed at him. "Don't go fucking with me about it when I'm right neither."
"No fucking, I promise. Them's the rules."
The locks disengaged one after the other heavily, like great stones dropped into a metal well, and the isolation door began to slide open and groan along its track into the wall in which it was housed. Blood painted the floor in streaks and great puddles and was spattered against what walls they could
see as it opened and Naeus smiled in anticipation. His grin reached its apogee when a dead limb appeared and then the corpse it belonged to. But then his mouth fell open and his eyes screwed up in disbelief. Another dead man was revealed and then another after that and the man who had made them all had sat himself in the far corner amidst the shadows of death. They looked across the blood and gore that colored the cell and the dead and colored him and he picked his chin up from his breast and looked back at them, his eyes faint sparks in the dark.
"He ain't dead." Naeus said. "Girda, he ain't dead."
Girda matched the bloody man's stare and nodded and then said, "No. No, Naeus, he isn't. But he will be. Are you injured, Prisoner?"
"Come here." Sejanus said through the dryness of his throat. "Find out."
"Stand up, inmate." He said and took a step backward to the side of the cell. "We'll get you to the infirmary. Get you cleaned up."
Sejanus made to get to his feet and then fell back upon his hand, propped against the stone of the floor. He winced and held his left flank as if he did not the ribs there would splay outward through the skin. Another attempt and he was upright, walking from the cell with his head unbowed and nary a limp or hobble. There at the threshold and breathing the open, fresh air that did not stink so much of death he looked upon the Enforcers and then turned to march off where he knew they would take him.
"He killed them." Naeus said. "All three. By the gods, he's still standing."
"And they'll kill him." Girda said and shook his head. "Damn shame."
Day 5
He stepped without the doors of the lift and surveyed the horde of prisoners waiting already in the pod, as though in a dream that they could not go on with without him. The doors closed behind him and he glanced back at them. Sejanus returned his eyes to the hundreds that were then upon him and studying the bruised ruin of his face. Beneath their stares he took a stride away from the lift and then slid to the floor against the wall.
A man parted from the close mass of inmates before him and in his hand was a knife and Sejanus was on his feet in a moment, readied. He saw through the bleary world the drugs left him with that it was Nyar and he approached him as if he were a lone child uselessly making a defense against the wolves. He slowed some paces away yet and to his side advanced the interminable ranks of what had become in that place his sad parody of soldiers, himself of himself.
"I might've known you'd live." Nyar said. "You know, I don't want to have to do this. I didn't believe the men when they told me, but you've lived up to your reputation; those were good men you killed."
"I've got room for a few more." Sejanus said to him. "On my count."
"A few maybe." He said and began to pace before him. "Before I kill you: why?"
"They told me you were in command. And I thought maybe you wouldn't fuck up the first time."
There were a few chuckles that he heard, nervous and diffused far apart from one another. But the longer the silence of their leader was permitted to build, the more those assembled around him descended as well into quietude.
"But I don't want it; I never did want one." Sejanus said and shook his head as though something awful had worked its way into his system. "Come and try me. Single combat. You first, then the others."
"The Rite of Challenge is reserved for true Men, Sejanus." Nyar said and then shrugged. "All I see here is a rabid dog. Unfit for service."
And so they set upon him, as one. With crude tools and careless swings – the mad bent of butchers.
Day 5
They went on beside each other in a tight-lipped silence. It was only them that walked the walkways. He had not seen or heard another and it might have been strange for him, his mind not elsewhere and mapping scenarios and words to fit them. Leargam had not spoken and had not looked toward him save to investigate some far off point in the distance that was perhaps not there at all.
"Listen," Tezac said as they drew up to the door of the next pod.
"Ain't nothin to say." Said the old man and passed his bracer over the scanner. "That stuff'll kill you, what's left of you. And that's all."
The doors parted and admitted the roar that Tezac had taken as only the storm outside. Leargam gave no curious glance and instead stepped through without reserve. He followed, himself drawn up in what loomed forthcoming and what hounded him of old. Thus it was not until he saw the horde of inmates below and by chance of wayward eye that any incongruity struck him. That they all shouted and congealed as at the impact crater of some curiosity born of the cosmos, for only on Cocytus and the worlds with which it shared much had brawls been levied such importance. Here one against several, blades against fists.
"Leargam," Tezac said to his back, for the old man had gone on while he had stopped.
"The turrets will handle it." Leargam said without turning and went on still.
Tezac looked and they hung limp from the ceiling of the courtyard. Inactive, harmless. Perfect witnesses to what transpired below. He zoomed in his visor's display on those who fought fought there and saw in detail the wounds the lone one bore. Blood soaking through the front of his coveralls and the ragged strips of cloth and flesh intertwined where the knives had cut deep. And so he caught sight of the symbol burned into the nape of his neck, the globe pierced by the chained spike and placed there by laser upon Citadel induction. He enhanced his view until he could read the words he knew to be there stencilled above it: 'Orbital Breach and Planetary Assault Forces'.
"The turrets aren't working." He said.
"You say something?" Leargam said and at last turned around, far down the walkway.
"The turrets aren't working." Tezac repeated, shouting, and activated the exo-suit's strength modules and kicked out the polymer observation window as he leapt down into the space between the wall and the cordon of inmates which enrounded the one.
He landed with the wounded and staggering man at his back and his attackers braced before him. Dead beneath their feet were those that he guessed had come first and in less numbers. He studied the man who stood center of them all and dropped yet into fighting stance as though no more had happened than the wind shifting of a sudden. One of untold hundreds, different in no way but the shade of their skin or the length and part of their hair. But in his eyes he could see what lay beneath his scowl and builtup hatred and taut tattooed muscle. As any man can in another, as the prisoner weighed him then. And he did not find it in those that flanked him.
Thus Tezac aimed his rifle at him and fired and shot dead the man behind as his target rolled to the side. A knife struck the plating of his suit across the shoulder and he butted him who wielded it with his rifle and caved in the nasal cavity in a spurt of blood. He had no sooner returned to those before him when they fell upon him with the weight of multitudes and still more bearing on them in turn from behind. For all the strength of his solitary armor, he was forced to the ground. Blows beat against him like hailstones bound to accomplish little but worried over all the same. Knives cut across his chestplate and bent themselves trying to pierce it. He fired blindly and blood sprayed upon him; but another just as quickly replaced him from whom it came and his rifle was wrestled out of his augmented grip. There was gunfire somewhere above as well, above the shouting and dull beating of flesh and bone upon polymer. But it was thus drowned out.
"Turrets Courtyard 5 reactivate." He said over the helmet's command channel. "Override designation: Tezac Hotchkins, 51322970608."
"Turrets activated." A voice said to all those assembled that had surged forth at last seeing a guard leap into the pit and come within reach, gods so long cut off by silver ladders now brought low. "Threat detected. Economical Neutralization protocols activated."
The machines blared, droned loud and commenced firing. Those in the front rank and those behind them were reduced to masses of pulp and red. Tezac saw the man he suspected to be their leader tumble three rows deep, handing his knife off into the stomach of the man who had been behind him at that moment. The g
unfire ceased and all the sound that there was in the courtyard was that of the many feet shuffling slowly back and away. Stormy waters receding beaten from a rock face thought to be malleable, but vowed to in some way return.
Tezac scrambled to his feet and recovered his rifle and braced it against his hip, swayed it in an arc across the tide of depraved flesh that retreated from before him then. They were silent now and moved so slow and langourous that he thought they might not have been moving at all. He stepped backward over the inmate that sat bleeding where he had collapsed against the wall upon his arrival and kept one arm aloft to uphold his rifle at the other prisoners and with the other scanned the codes of the man's identification tattoos with his bracer.
'Hastur Victor Sejanus', his display read and beneath it a photo of his face as it appeared clean of blood. His military record was listed alongside his prison record and Tezac navigated to it and therein saw the names of a hundred different, familiar worlds. He picked the man's face up by the chin and inspected the gashes above his right eye and along both cheeks. Long, deep. The paths of a life misspent. Himself a road of many roads as ancient as the stone they had been hewn from. Their conclusions all but uncertain.
"Infirmary drone to Courtyard 5." Tezac said. "Immediate medical attention."
Then he slung his rifle and scooped the prisoner into his arms and the servos in the suit's knees whined as they bore him up onto the walkway, through the hole they had helped him to make in its shielding. There Leargam only looked upon him, mouth agape and eyes wide. And Tezac looked back, imponderable as the tinted visor of his helmet.
"The hell were you thinking?" The old man finally said.
"I don't know." Tezac said and shrugged with the dying man in his arms as if in the gesture he could account for something in him. "Nothing."
Leargam shook his head and glared at him a bit longer before turning away. "Godsdamned junkies," he heard him mutter and inside something shrivelled away to nothing. It was all he could do to look after him, even after he had long gone, until the medical drone arrived from their hive deep within the complex and with an escort of blaring attack drones.
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