They did as it bade and moved in anxious starts out onto the tier, to meld into the ranks of their neighbors that were four rows deep already. He looked up and saw the drones flitting through the pale golden drab of the light that shone down from above. They rolled their scanning waves across the prisoners and one soon ascended to the seven hundredth tier to which they belonged, up from the level below it. The blue grid fell over them and thus a klaxon began to sound.
"Unauthorized inmate presence detected." Master Control said from the drone's communicator. "Rectifying."
It swivelled in place where it hovered and the extended dishes of its targeting arrays settled on him. He heard across the long space the chamber of its railgun energizing and so he made to duck down behind the men before him; but they had done so as well and they along with those behind him held him up to the drone. Villagers to an angry god.
"Removing," Master Control said. "Please remember: a chaotic society makes for no society."
"Belay that, Control." The same man said over the open-air transmitter.
A quiet ensued between the two then and he could hear again the low pulse and hum of the turret that hung slantwise from its spherical body, a mess of wires and offcenter plating outlined by the light above it.
"Are you certain, Enforcer Oborz?" It said finally and to Sejanus sounded disappointed.
"We have the transfer file right here. Synching the code status with your mainframe now."
"Recieved." Master Control said and then the drone floated away, saying: "Please remember: reactionary acts cause reactions."
"You're welcome." The voice said once it had gone and the other inmates released him. "Greetings from Tower 8, Prisoner 71."
"You would have done the same." One of the convicts said from behind and brushed past him to the front of the ranks.
Sejanus said nothing, nor did he acknowledge in any way those around him that had arrested his flight. He knew on some level that they had been right to do it and that perhaps the man could have been right in what he said, had he addressed them. Thus the ghosts of the old rage flew up at him from where he stared betwen his feet and urged him onto those that had taken hold of him. But it was to be expected, and ghosts know little of what to do with the things in life that are.
"Alright," Said the voice of the control tower. "Looks like everything‘s by the numbers. Meyers. Who's this? Teague Meyers, who's seen him? Come on, pipe up."
"He's dead." Some prisoner from a tier below them shouted.
"What's that, 574?"
"He fell out of the pod that way. I don't know what happened to him."
"Must be another godsdamned hypo malfunction." They heard him mutter to whomever shared the booth with him and then went on. "Well it don't give you mourning rites, dickhead. Go on, hussle up. Hit the chutes."
They wobbled about face all across the tiers that ringed the vast, lighted heights of the holding tower. Sejanus moved as they moved and started forward only when they would and no more. They meandered slow into the mouth of the chute ahead and kept the air alive with chatter indistinct to him. The sea of their heads passed into twilight and beneath figures that flailed at them with their electrified whips from upon platforms to either side, shouting amidst the crackling and drawn out of the gloom like phantoms in the light of the electrodes. He thought then that if they had wool, they should be sheep. Himself stuck in amongst them, a piece unable to be fit and no matter the turn of the hand that did it.
He passed beside the guardsmen stationed along the walls that harried them with voices lost in the cacophony of them all, beating at them with batons and spittle flying from their lips. He had gone deaf to them and their blows fell upon him as they would upon stone. He flinched at their coming only in the way tired men do at sounds imagined or real. They passed through the lights overhead, tucked up between the crossbeams so that they shone like lone beacons through the darkness. The scanners there as well alerted at intervals the guards that were hidden within recesses in the walls and invisible until they were already within reach. These took some of the inmates that came near enough and into the rooms that they stood guard without. Random happenings in the greater mess of things that transpired under no more notice than one would pay sudden movement or sudden noise.
A greater light broke ahead and within it the rusted gloom of the magrail port. A haze moved across the opened gateway and billowed through its teeth in great clouds that the floodlights above the opening penetrated diffusely. He wondered then as the inmates plunged through the bloody glow of its curtain if they had not found the Helmouth, if his waking that morning had not been his life passing from one condemned existence to another. The lights atop it flared with a secret fury and the toothed archway itself quivered as it screamed with the thousands it had seen damned within. Then he was herded beyond and the clarity of the world became normality. Metal only metal; light only light.
Teams of guardsmen lashed them into formation from above and the smell of ozone filled the air each time the whips struck true, the smell of burnt flesh. They were thus corralled before the outfitting hubs and were taken onto the supply pads by threes and then ejected, discarded to bear the next trio. Like clockwork, dispossessed men pilgrimaging to sites of plenty and recieving it in a manner unexpected. A creature of humanity stepped onto the dais and once swept round became something more, something less. Beings of heavy, protective leathers and filtration masks and equipment packs that went lopsided and borne down beside their naked peers as they progressed to the platforms of the magrail port. Man had contrived how to make chains of what clothed him.
Soon they filled the platforms that sat stuck out into the dark of the tunnels like quays into a terrible sea and milled about their great expanse in the cold and red dusk of the station. He watched the plumes of the steam rise to the ceiling from the gaps at the edges of the grated floor where it met the wall and curl across the lamps scattered spare upon the distant ceiling. They flocked to the light of these in some dim memory of what it had been to stand in the sun and held their arms close about themselves. Speaking low beneath the eye of the Enforcers and passing jury-rigged chem-sticks amongst groups that made competeing circles in the press of them all. Sejanus had made himself a part of them in search of latent body heat, if not for the company there is in misery.
"You don't talk much, soldier." A man said to him with blue rag tied about his arm and Sejanus traced with his eyes the symbols cut as scars into his cheeks and singed into his long beard.
"Soldier?" He said through the filtration mask and met the man's coal eyes.
"Don't play with us." He said and the others in the circle who shared his color and his signs laughed. "You are OBPAF; you have the mark."
The bearded man took two fingers and smacked at the back of his own neck.
"Lots of guys do." Sejanus said. "What's it to you?"
"Nothing much," He said and put his hands out in mock concern. "Except that we are all True Union here. But you may not know it. Outside you called us SepSecs, while you busied with murdering our people."
"Listen," Sejanus said and stepped into the circle. "Are we having a problem?"
"I don't know, soldier." The bearded man said and joined him in the center and closer he was a bigger man. "The talk is that loyalists love causing problems. Baby does not like being put down in one place too long, I hear."
"Tram arrival," Master Control said over the port's transmitters. "Imminent. Tram arrival: imminent. Please stand clear of the edge and assemble for boarding."
They were each taken by the reformation and realignment of those they stood with upon the platform and were separated, though would not turn or look away from one another. As seaside mountains that, worn away so long at their roots by the tide, free themselves from the land and drift apart but never out of sight. Each had been marked in the other's memory and even in death would live on there, for in such places and with such men as they all slights deserve as much.
Day 17
He shuffled forward at the behest of those before and behind him, all of them adrift in the river that they comprised. Ahead the line stalled and then went again. So it had gone for some time, but he could not see why beyond all those in front of him. The walls stood high to either side and where they curved inward to meet he could see in the conical glow of the overhead lights the matte of inudstrial patriculates which clung to the air there.
"Standby," He began to hear faintly and followed by a useless number of words that he could not until the line had progressed further and it repeated in its robotic voice: "Standby for nutritional injections."
The pound and groan of machinery soon all but drowned out any other noise and he came close enough in the procession's slow way that he could see the archway into which the inmates filed toward their hell. They were stopped therein by the guardsmen beyond it and a pair of mechanical arms detached from the threshold to stab autohypos into the neck of him who awaited them. It came his turn and he did as the voice bade and stood by while his infusions were administered. The Enforcers ushered him onward into the teem of prisoners already processed.
He felt no better as his feet dragged at the heels of the others. The heat that built with each of his steps did little to abate his condition. The shouted voices of the workers who toiled somewhere beyond the length of hall that he travelled down became audible beneath the churn and hissing gouts of smoke and steam.
The corridor opened ahead and he stepped out onto the stone of the floor that was mingled with debris and dirt and shavings of metal. He was struck full by the swelter of the conflagrations that plumed in the distance and could no longer tell where his skin stopped and the air began. Every breath parched his throat and here and there across the factory floor he saw those who had felt the same, who had found no remedy for it but in death. Left where they lay, stepped over and moved out of the way. Made a game of.
They were halted before a cordon of high containment walls and over their gates were the guardsmen who did so, standing three atop a platform there. Those who had arrived before him were crammed now against the forward barrier and no more could be fit at the rear and so the small door by which they all had entered began to close, sounding the klaxon that sat above it. Somewhere far off he saw the dark hulks of the things he had once used in murder and destruction that now fell to him to breathe life into.
"Able-bodied men form here." The foremost of the guards said and indicated the area of the courtyard to their left, then that to their right. "Physical deficients here. Honesty will be observed."
The inmates shuffled through and jostled one another as they made their way to the designated places through the ranks thick with their fellows. Sejanus had gone to his left, with those others that were fit to slave. He looked to where the men had gone that were not and wondered what such facile men could have done to be condemned to this fate. But he remembered the shapes that evil travels in and how the great sometimes do so with the small and so returned his eyes to the front.
"You there," The guard who had spoken to them shouted and pointed down into those of them disused to work, at a man therein tall and wiry and who looked on his face to be caught up in the whole show by mistake. "What is your condition?"
"Me?" The man said and indicated himself and the guard nodded curtly, his finger still levelled at the man. "Wasting disease I picked up, on Juiya. I can't lift very much. Sir. Or work for too long."
The Enforcer nodded again and said, "Shoot him."
"Wait!" He had started to cry out, but the gunfire of those next to the officer who had ordered his death ended it before it could be finished.
"You will work." The officer said. "Or you will die. Pray, pray to your outmoded gods, that it is death – and not the colony, for you."
He surveyed the prisoners massed before the hot gates, silent and unmoving and staring forward into nothing with the same tired eyes as though it were only a cavalcade of engines that had misfired. Thus he turned from them and waved for his subordinates to follow and the klaxons sounded for what seemed the hundredth, thousandth time only that day, for all days had become a continuous one. The gates before them, to either side, began to open and slide upward in a slow drudgery to where they were secured as new ramparts atop the wall, new blacknesses against the flaring flames in the distance. Standing water let loose from a dam, they flowed outward through the two new gaps.
One of the men at the front of their column was struck dead no sooner than he had departed the cordon and then the shouting began. They wore prisoners' clothes and beat them through the gauntlet that they had formed with bits of metal, strung up by cabling and leather. Another fell some paces in line ahead, laid low by what looked a Rayl through the smog. Those who had been behind him marched on and he passed beneath their feet in the abiding silence of death. The creature that had done it smiled in the vertical way of its maw and it was by the rotting yellow of the teeth therein that Sejanus kept sight of it as they progressed, the blackened rest of it blending with the smoke.
Thus he tried to move away from it. But as did all those he shared that torment with, a flinching and starting mass that for all its fright could not flee from the blows that came. A constant reshuffling that awarded no one nothing more than temporary reprieves at the expense of the whole. Sejanus drew away from the Rayl ahead only to find himself drifting toward it again as the inexorable course of the river went on.
All around him men fell. He had stepped over the corpse of a man whose skull had been caved in beneath the cudgel of a Khagani that raged now behind him. He eyed the Rayl. The Rayl seemed to eye him, even as it struck the inmates that passed before it wantonly. Screams became his world, blood and the blunt thwack of steel against meat. Smoke and the scorching air. But through it all he held the eyes of that beast.
The Rayl swung out at him and he caught up its wrist in one hand and with the other took hold of the arm and pulled it low. Then he put his boot into the joint of the limb and watched the bone break through the black scales in a spray of green. It shrieked and recoiled toward the lines of its comrades in wild fear. He bent and took up its flail from the earth and held the thing fast and with the weapon in hand dove forward and brought the thonged gear down onto its brow. The tall beast toppled over onto the floor, through the boundaries of the gauntlet and made a space in its death.
He was seized of a sudden by arms enough that he knew not how many had laid hold of him. They pulled him out from the effusion that ran within the gauntlet and threw him down beside the corpse he had made. It lay there bleeding, the tied-off cog buried deep into the bone. He squirmed backward from it until meeting the wall and those who had removed him closed in, six in all. Humans, mostly. But at the forefront of them all towered one of the red giants that hail from the world called Khagan. He beat his chest, muscle as hard as steel and roared at him in the bestial warcries of his people.
A form passed before him. Blood spattered against everything and the Khagani split into two halves that toppled opposite one another, viscera strewn from either and pooling with the red of his veins. He drew heavy, heaving breaths still and hugged himself as he looked to Sejanus, but not at him. Broad eyes under a heavy ridged brow that bespoke the end he had foreseen long ago. Mouth agape, gaze colder and more distant as the moments passed. His breast soon ceased to rise and fall and Sejanus felt a sting as his sweat rolled down into the cut that had been made at the bridge of his nose. A figure strode slowly into view and flexed the dark shapes of its wings before removing them to their chitinous sheaths. The other inmates of the gauntlet ran.
"You are in bad habit," The shadow said. "Of making too much of your first arrivals."
It turned around and gave him its three-pronged hand and he took it.
"How did you know?" He said as it pulled him to his feet and succeeded in pulling him a sight from the floor.
>
"That gate is for newcomers." He said through the heavy cycling of his mask. "I know that this is not the first of such gates you pass through of late, because I know you are transfer. I know you are transfer, because I did not see you with the other new arrivals this morning. If you had been here long – and cause problems like this one, to get transferred – you would have just been shot. Or sent to the colony. You will want shot – if there is choice. I am Jobaal."
"Sejanus," He said and shook the hand offered to him. "You're a Jedezian."
"They let us out of Sector 10, from time to time. To mingle with the other species."
"Fly-Korps, too. The way you handled him."
"Bred and trained." It said with the Concilium salute. "Veteran of both Korblast and Ulrime. Among others of course, but you know the fighting there was in the gas giants."
"We heard about it in the Outerverse. How you dealt with the Hab-Flotillas. I didn't envy you; I can tell you that." He said. "You said Sector 10?"
"The only non-human containment sector."
"There's a man I know, got transferred there a couple months ago." He said. "A guard."
"New Enforcers come every day." The Jedezian said and shrugged with shoulders too large for his kind in nature. "They go just as fast."
"You'd know him. Used to be a Lord-Knight."
"I would call you a liar, a Lord-Knight reduced to this place, if I did not know otherwise. The Concilium does not breed even its OBPAF soldiers that large."
"Tell him I'm alright." Sejanus said. "If you can."
"We will see when the day is through. If you survive, then I will tell him." Jobaal said and threw its arm around his shoulders. "Come. You need a foreman; I need a welder. You will join my fitting crew."
"What do you fit?"
"We have done most everything. Those who have lived of course. Today we do personnel carriers; tomorrow, who knows. Life is an adventure."
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