The wide gulf of space ran before him and the object that was his harbinger grew nearer and out of the obscurity of distance and darkness. A thing of age and elements unknown, a construction that did not allow for understanding; indeed, kept him from understanding through the intelligence that it wielded within and that he knew had brought him there. That wanted him to see and by the light of the fields of stars that it swallowed into its shadow. A thing beyond the conceptions of flesh and metal, for here both worked in tandem. A leviathan of the abyss that then opened its eye to him and bathed him in a pool of light greater than all of that in the sky. There was nothing but its emerald depths, a moon unto itself, and he was swallowed a thousandfold into the darksome chasm that lay at its heart.
Thus it spoke to him and in a voice that defied understanding, a language that broke his mind to hear it. So resonant that it felt he heard the underlying currents of the universe calling to him, collapsing upon him from all round. He curled into himself as he floated weightless in the arms of space and clutched his ears. Its alien cadences burned into his thoughts the timeless heiroglyphs that he saw to paint its surface, those parts of it not infested with symbiotic growth. Time ceased to pass, existence as he understood it to quit.
A pit yawned open upon its underbelly then. A light filtered out diffusely from within amd illuminated its black recesses, the sheen of the ooze that seeped from its walls. It wavered through the lightlessness and soon came to engulf him, to separate him from the darkness of the starry void around him. He became less a part of it and the universe it illustrated and more a part of something else, something the origin of which could not be illustrated. A wind blew in the emptiness of space and he heard it, felt it usher him into that abyss looming above him. He watched its lips shudder as it drew him in and he screamed, but he made no sound.
There were no stars inside, no sun or moon. No Cocytus, and that most of all had been impossible. Air came and went as he breathed and he vomitted into the expanse that waited below his feet and listened as it splattered into the muck that his own sounded out there below. His head spun, his eyes watered and he looked everywhere without any spot he focused upon appearing any different than the one before it.
His stomach rose into his chest and he dropped from whatever roost he had been held in. He plunged to his neck into the morass that stewed below and floundered until he found his feet, submerged still to his thighs, and loped blindly through it. He collided with what felt as columns in the dark and pushed against them only to fall himself, for they would not yield. Tezac breathed in the putrescence of the fluids that consumed him each time and each time hurriedly stood again. He went on until crashing into a wall that writhed at his touch and to his skin was like no material he had ever known to be used to build.
He gave up finding some nook in the chamber, hidden and safe, and fumbled sightlessly with his wristand until the holotorch activated. He recoiled to the wall though it moved against him and made to scramble back up its sleek surface, but to no avail. Everywhere he looked the eyeless skins of illimitably varied beings stared back at him, floating idly in and upon the mire that was at once brown and black and yellow with what he did not care to identify.
There were stalks that towered amid them all. Rows upon rows of stalks that had no color and no end save that which darkness gave them. Figures draped from them along their heights and were bound to them by bundles of fleshy cords that ran into the bases of their skulls. The surface tissue of a few was raw and sticky with a pinkish goo that ran in strings from whatever parts they moved. They peered at him through the gloom he had made. Mouths agape, eyes filled with a complete and silent knowledge. They rose up into a chorus of moans and danced like marionettes with too little string. The voices that dwelled within the shadows beyond his light put up as many walls at its luminous edges as those of haunted empires and he did not have any wish to cross.
"Behold the garden of my flesh." Voices said that came not from those he beheld. "One of many spread throughout this vessel; harvested from a thousand thousand worlds."
"Where am I?" He said. "What is this place?"
"You see what I would have you see. I speak as you would have me speak."
"Show yourself." He said and darted to and fro at the darkness that enclosed him. "Radghar give me strength."
"I know of this one. What are you? Your species is unknown to me."
"Human." He said and stopped where he stood and pivoted slow to take in all that was around him. "I'm human. Don't let me be dead, not now."
"You seek to decieve me. That species is known to me."
"What do you want with me?"
"You know what I do not. I seek to know more."
A piercing keen filled his ears and he put his hands to them and it grew so loud that his own cries of pain were drowned out. The beings that hung from the stalks joined him. He stumbled through the muck in search of where it was loudest and found it to be nowhere, that it went wherever he did. Words were buried somewhere within it, calling murky and resonant from within some deep and unknowable fathom that he knew could not exist but now undulated all about him.
His feet left the mire and he was carried again into the foul air above, transported to where the pain rendered all a nothingplace. He was conscious of the conduits that he passed through, but saw no more of their unlimited extents than meat and bone and machine made one. His bracer cast off the darkness only fleetingly on his journey and and took from it horrors beyond horrors.
Tendrils reached out to him and jabbering maws mocked and yowled and bit at one another. Twitching things crossed into his nimbus and went back out of it again, into blackness. Screams came within earshot and sounded above the passageways he floated through, inarticulate and sad. The closeness of metal and flesh intertwined was transposed with the vastness of a chamber he could not contemplate the limits of.
He took his hands away from his ears to shield his eyes from a light that came sudden and far greater than his own and they showed crimson with blood in the crimson brilliance. It came from a tube and within that tube writhed the shadow of something monstrous and without end. Soon he was borne away to the walls that had seemed unreachable and there across their rounding expanse saw the legions of forms that squirmed pale and wasted within the iron bonds which held them there. The force that held him placed him among them and the hulking figures that skittered there among the damned laid hold of him.
Their black arms slithered through the air and round this limbs, furry and coarse and burning. He could not breathe and their hot breath fell upon him moist, issuing from behind the silver teeth that lined dripping mouths. Tezac searched for their eyes but they had none. Their heads slight mounds of dark shapelessness that bristled in the light which shone from behind them. They placed him within the grasp of their machines and their metal ribs enclosed first about his shoulders and then down upon the rest of him.
He struggled against them, but for all his inhuman strength they were immovable. He shouted at his captors and pleaded with them, but they'd no ears to hear him. They disappeared both above and below him, traversing the sinuous walls with suckered feet. He raged against the cage that was about him and cried out to all that would listen and then a pain unlike any he had known before entered into where his spine met his skull. But he fell silent, still and rigid. His eyes were held open wide, but they saw nothing of what was before them. They had gone the way of his mind, to another place. Beyond where dreams are made.
Day 8: Night
He rounded the corner and saw there ahead of him in the road a dark shape that protruded from the snows. It was unalike to the mounds of debris discarded against the walls of the buildings to either side, in their alleyways and out into the gutters. He went over to it as quick as he could in the knee-deep snows, stumbling. He called out to it drunkenly, shouting the name of whom he thought it was; but he was given no reponse. He collapsed beside the figure and drew it out of the white and onto his knees as he had once before.
A scan of his vitals returned normal to his visor's display and he wondered how that might be, stuck out in the interminable winter for as long as he had been and without his exo-suit. But he remembered what it was that he held in his arms: a thing made by men and in the shape of men, though only through technicalities remained a man. It was this that kept him alive that also weighed him down, too heavy for Leargam to carry or even to drag through the storm, and his resistance to the elements could last only so long. As with all the works of humankind. So he drew his pistol and stood from the hole he had made in the snow and looked to the door from which Tezac had come through the snowbank built up outside of it.
It stood rusted and frozen and only half on its anchors in the wall. Its sensors mewled at his presence and it shuddered in its frame to open, but only slammed to and fro on its track. He engaged the servo-motors of his exo-suit and kicked the door and it flew off into the room beyond, the edge of the wall it was fastened to along with it. The men and women who carpeted the floor groaned at the noise and the new light of the outside world and the figure that it framed in the doorway. He engaged the flashlight of his helmet and shined it across the walls and then into the corners.
Figures fidgeted there who looked to have turned them into personal abattoirs for those who writhed limply along the floor. They stopped what it was they did as his light came upon them and the dull thwacking that he had heard ceased also. Their eyes screwed up at him and were devoid of reason. They looked to one another and then at him and rushed the doorway.
He leapt back through it into the street and they converged upon its ingress. He pulled once on the trigger and the pistol's burst laid into the tangle of dirt and flesh before him, hacking blindly at the air and themselves with the crudest implements. The slugs bore into them and took limbs and produced gobbets of meat into the air, great effusions of blood loosed with each one. One remained that was hidden and shielded behind the rest and he charged out from behind their falling corpses and through the broken doorway. Leargam jabbed quickly at the man's jaw with his free hand and there was a loud snap as his neck lolled awkwardly and he fell limp to the ground.
The old man stepped over the maimed and the dead and made for the light that streamed out into the dusk from a room at the back. A shot rang out no sooner than he had entered and a force knocked his shoulder away as the bullet ricocheted off the plating there. He heard a dull clunk and then muttered curses, rattling of metal. He went over to the sofa from where it came and threw it aside and took the man who cowered behind it up by the collar of his soiled and tattered vest.
"I need as many doses of STIM," He said to him. "As you gave him Mute."
The man only whimpered and Leargam heard something trickle onto the floor. He brought the pistol round and placed the muzzle beneath his chin and he could feel him then begin to shake. The man took his hand away from that which upheld him only for so long as it took to point out the ventilation duct at the base of the wall to his right. He stammered that it was in there and so Leargam let him drop to the floor and onto his knees.
He kicked the covering away that was already dislodged and knelt down to look within. The old man looked over the stacks of vials and the autohypos scattered amidst them, the parcels packed thick along the walls of the shaft. None were labelled and a man such as he knew not the color, or the odor. He looked back over his shoulder. The man spoke ceaselessly and unintelligibly and rocked back and forth with his hands clasped before him, praying now to dead gods. He turned and grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him over to the crawlspace.
"Which one is ist?" He said to him.
"Please don't." He said.
"Which."
"Please."
He smacked him lightly.
"Pick out the ones that are STIM cocktails."
"Take it," He said and reached into the duct. "Take everything. Just don't kill me."
Soon the doses he needed in tandem and more were laid before him and he gave the man a pouch that was laid haphazard on the floor beside them. He commenced to fill it and went on with his mantra. When it was full he picked the satchel up from the floor himself and switched the pistol to single-fire and shot the man between the eyes as he walked past and then out of the room.
Day 9: Early Morning
He opened his eyes and blinked in vain at the blurriness of the world. The bright overhead lights stabbed at him and he turned away from them toward the wall, where it swam in a dark haze. A shiver passed through him and he curled deeper into the MedSlab's invisible and heated embrace, feeling the sweat that soaked through his clothes. Warmth upon warmth swelled to his eyes and filled his head with such a weight that he could not pick it up from the steel he lay upon. His joints ached, his thoughts reeled and were bent nowhere but to all of what he had seen in the light of the moon and beyond. A spectre of the will that was housed there, deep in orbit, and seemed to him then to know that he had awoken.
"Hey," A voice said and thundered in his ears, for all its quiet comfort, and a hand sopped the sweat from his brow with a damp cloth. "How are you feeling?"
"Katherine," He said and looked to her, where she leaned over him, and his world sobered. "Where am I?"
"Medical," She said and relaxed to where she sat beside him. "At Headquarters."
"Gods," He said and sat up onto the edge of the MedSlab. "What time is it?"
"It's the middle of the night." She said and put her hand on his shoulder as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
"How did I get here?"
"Your friend brought you. Said his name was Leargam. It was only an hour or two ago; you really don't remember?"
"Remember what?"
"You couldn't walk on your own but you were conscious." She said and stood from the MedSlab, went to lean in the doorway of the chamber and crossed her arms. "He said he found you out in town. Buried in the snow, unresponsive. It must have been hours, the way things line up. You should be dead."
"I feel it."
"Tezac," She said and clasped her hands before her and stood free from the threshold.
"What?" He said and looked at her over his shoulder.
"The MedSlab's readings." She said and fidgeted where she stood. "There was enough synthetic adrenal enchancers in your blood to make a Khagani's heart burst. And the nervous tranquilizers beyond that."
"So I have a problem; who doesn't in this place." He said and stood to his feet. "That's why we're all out here, isnt it?"
"That's not so much what I'm concerned about." She said and stepped nearer to him. "You metabolized all of this, with the first stages of hypothermia, in the time it took to have a nap."
"What's your point."
"Is it true what they do to you at the Citadel?" She asked. "What they've done to you. To your – 'kind'."
"All we ever know," He said. "Is what we're told. And that's nothing."
"Wait," She said as he brushed past her toward the corridor and bit the inside of her lip. "What about the Mute?"
"You’re a doctor. You've heard of cyber-psychosis." He said and turned back round to face her.
"Your hand." She said and took up the metal fingers glinting dull in the evening lamplight, huge in hers.
"I've got nothing from the wrist that's mine."
"I thought most cases of neural rejection were more extensive." She said. "Full cybernetics, total limb replacement."
"They are. I don't have it. But I can feel it just enough, below the bone. The gnawing that something is still there when I know it isn't. And it's constant. Like something that'd reconnect if only I'd just let it." He said and looked into her eyes, she back at his, and then down at his feet. "You should know I'm not a strong man."
And then he went. Out into the darkened lane that ran long between the banks of MedSlabs along either side. His shoulders stooped to the level of men who have been beaten to how they stand, over the length of the years and little by little. Fearful of bringing them back up again for what notice it mi
ght bring to those forces that had put them there to begin with. Little did he know, and for which Katherine shook her head, that such things had passed and would not revisit him save in new forms that he brought on by choice alone and once he knew how to face them. When they would find themselves as waves that in crashes and tides brought away none of the rock that held them at bay. As useless and ineffectual as assaulting the heavens with mortal instruments.
Day 9
"First week planetside," Leargam said from across the tram and shook his head, watched what he spoke of from the window. "And you get transferred. Me with you."
"I don't stay where I'm put." Tezac said and went away from his own window beside Leargam to sit down farthest from him.
"Ain't that admirable." The old man said. "You know where we're headed, don't you?"
"You had the same instructions I did."
"Hells," He said. "Maybe if Idve left you out in that storm they would have looked more kindly on me."
Tezac looked away out the tram car and watched Cocytus roll past beyond and wondered in some small way what life could live out there.
"Come on," Leargam said and stood from the bench on the far side and went over to him, sat down beside him. "I didn't mean it."
"I know what you meant." He said and waited for the old man to go on, but he didn't. "I need help, Leargam. I've got too much in common with that sound out there."
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