"No."
"I will not ask again."
"You won't have any argument from me."
"Vocal patterns indicate antagonistic behaviour. Please remember, Prisoner 1871: isolation is a period of quiet and stillness, during which an inmate can reflect upon the transgression for which he is being punished. Insubordination during this time indicates a greater need for solitude, and can result in further sentencing."
Sejanus said nothing. He coiled into himself, arms about his knees, and listened to the slow heavy filtrations of his airtube and closed his eyes and fell into the cadences of the thought-mantra used in times past against the shock of artillery barrages or the hyper-vigilance of nighttime excursions into deep jungle and forest territory. A calm transcended him, that of which he spoke to himself – a nexus of all points meeting that fear and rage were only shadows of and must so be bansihed from the conscious mind to achieve perfect efficiency.
"Silence," Master Control said and grated against the fortifications he had arrayed for himself in his mind and the voice of the computer sneered, if such emotionless beings can be said to sneer at all. "Could be construed as a form of insubordination. Heart rate is falling to levels indicative of sleep. It is only 7 hours past alignment by the Core-standard count. Would you like a stimulant?"
"No," Sejanus said to the empty black before his closed eyes. "Thank you."
"We have quite a long time together, Prisoner 1871." Master Control said. "Please inform me if there is anything you need. I exist only to serve Man."
Day 18: Night
He was adrift. He hovered engulfed by waters that no light had ever touched let alone penetrated and knew no depth. He looked to the left and right of him where the currents swirled at turns in great shadows and ghostly light and slowly the vortex they comprised swallowed him. To where he knew a thing awaited him, a dweller in madness and all that was obscene and beyond the ken of what he and other men had taken reality to mean. There it coiled and lay and writhed somewhere beyond the void below him which gave up no indication that he neared what he dreaded so much more for the fact that he could not track its coming, save that the stink of eons out of time grew more pungent. Thus a pale and emerald light began to filter up to him – and to outline something terrible.
"It knows nothing of what we seek." Voices said that he had chosen to believe took place only in dreams. "But it must. He has not yet arrived. We must wait. And this one must protect him. He must become a part of us. We must add it to the flesh-gardens and take its shape for our own. But it resists. It is strong. But mortal. It will wither and die in the grasp of we who are without age."
Tezac closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and bent all of himself against the eels that slithered through his thoughts and sought to divulge what his mind held. He saw then the broken worlds. Those that had ended in deluge and drowned ruin; those that had been left emptied of life as though it had never been at all, only its structures left to speak for them. He saw the monuments and triumphs of a thousand thousand peoples annihilated and their empires lain waste. The great monstrosities that blotted out the suns that shine on dead worlds and the shambling servants that roam about their old and titanic girth. Most of all he witnessed the smooth, unhindered power with which ceaseless aspirants had been evaporated from time and the little Man knew of space.
"Do you see, so-called Human? How useless your struggles. How inevitable your fate. We are beyond all that you know. How can you contend with we who have wrought the desolation of existence?"
A sound filled his ears that was the death cries of all those worlds he had not seen but in the moments of their doom and now made one. The deranged gibbering and eldritch chanting of the entities that had swallowed their existence into a void that knew no limit and could not be satisfied, save by the fruition of plans obfuscated to all but the timeless and dark intellect which had made them before even the most distant epoch had begun.
But as he screamed back at them and the voices they had stolen he soon found his own could be heard above the rest, smothered no more by the countless dead. He looked about the gloom and quiet of his room then and threw off the covers soaked through with sweat and sat up on the edge of the bed. He shut his eyes long enough to smooth away what they had seen, but only beckoned what could not truly be forgotten. He leapt from bed and to the window, keyed off its tint and watched the moonlit surface and how its tranquil twinkling in a mirror of the stars would turn to blank white rage in mere hours. But he welcomed it now, while it remained in state. So it was that he saw the comms panel beside his door upon the far wall, reflected amidst this primordial peace and which it disturbed with the demons of the age. He could not help but go to it and dialed for the voice he wanted to hear.
"Hello," Said the man on the other end of the call.
"Leargam," He said. "It's Tezac."
"I know who it is. I wouldn't have answered the damn call if I didn't know who it is. Kid, it's the middle of the night."
"Meet me in the company bar as soon as you can. It's important."
"There's nothing important enough for me to oblige that request."
"Trust me."
There was a pause on the other end of the line so long that he worried Leargam had fallen back to sleep until he heard the old man say that he would and then the transmission ended. He breathed a sigh of relief that turned into a shudder and he looked out the window again and then up at the stars, the darkness which loomed between them. He needed no better argument than that to dress as much as was necessary and hurry out the door that seemed the slower in opening for the abyssal deep that lay beyond those points of light.
Day 19: Midnight
The doors opened on the bar and he scanned the barren field of tables that was populated only by the few men too adamant in their drink to leave. He found Leargam at the booth farthest from him, its little lamp shining dimly at the center of the table like a beacon for travellers to come in out of the rain. The old man sat with its glow upon his face as he leaned heavily upon his hand, asleep.
Tezac sat down across from him and tapped his elbow and he shot awake, looking about himself in the stupid surprise that comes only when roused. But he sobered no sooner than he saw Tezac across from him and joined him in leaning close onto the table. The dome of light lit their faces from below, death masks in the haggardness of night and altered circumstances. Unshaven, drawn and uncared for.
"Are you having anything?" Tezac said.
"Just what you're fixing to tell me."
"You ought to have a little of something."
Leargam thumbed the key of the dispensary that lay where the wall met the table and said to it, "Whiskey."
"Have you seen anything strange in the last few days?" Tezac said.
The tumbler dropped down into the slot and the old man watched the nozzle pour it full of the amber liquid with a certain kind of relish. The tiny door revolved open and the mechanical arm ejected his drink and said, "Thank you, Enforcer Leargam; have a nice day."
"You too, shit can." He said.
"I'm sorry." It went on as he turned away and put the glass to his lips, with the utmost sarcasm. "'Shit can', is not an appropriate order designation; did you mean 'Shiza Tzan', the Concilium-approved reproduction of the Petronin wine?"
"Oh piss on it." Leargam said and tossed the whiskey out onto the dispensary's interface, which then at last sat in its silent and sopping shame. "What'd you ask me?"
"I said have you found anything odd in the last few days."
"Other than the Jedezians' hive-tower? Or the Khagani shaman rituals? You know, how about we start with the Rayllic molting process. It excites me."
"I'm serious, Leargam."
"You think I'm not? Why are we even here? Why are they here?"
"Forget about the Outerversers for a second. Have you looked at the stars lately? Or the moons?"
"I ain't a poet."
"Neither am I."
"I don't know."
"At l
east once in the last couple months."
"Maybe." He said. "Yes. I don't write it down every time I look out the window."
"And you never saw a black spot where there wasn't supposed to be one. Some stars that were missing."
"This is what you woke me for?"
"What about dreams?"
"I'm convinced I'm in a bad one right now."
"I've seen a ship, Leargam." Tezac said loud enough to wake up the drunks that sat passed out over the tables. "In orbit. I've been inside it in my dreams. Only I don't think they were dreams."
"Okay," The old man said and touched him on the shoulder. "So you've seen a ship. What kind?"
"I don't know." Tezac said and cleared his eyes with the heel of his hand and took his temples between thumb and forefinger. "Nothing I've seen before. It was dark, almost like stone. And there were these growths all over it; but they weren't random, Leargam. It was like they were a part of it. Or the hull was a part of it. But the voices. The voices are what stay with you. They stayed with me."
"So you're hearing voices."
"I'm not crazy." Tezac said as he looked up of a sudden and could feel the spittle fly from his lips.
"Hey," Leargam said and held up his hands. "You wake me in the middle of th night and start raving about ships and tumors. And voices now. What would you think to hear me saying some of this? Are you sure this doesn't have something to do with something else?"
"No," Tezac said as he rubbed his brow, level and loud, then cut the air with his hand. "I mean yes. I'm sure. This is – this is something else. Not that. I haven’t in a while."
"And you said you've seen things?" Leargam said and inclined his head. "Or at least you asked me if I had."
"It was a while ago that it started. A few days after I got off the transport. It was my friend, from the Citadel. I was inducted with him. We fought together. His voice, maybe. But it wasn't him." Tezac explained and ordered a whiskey from the dejected dispensary, drained it. "I can't fight what I can't see. Somehow I think somebody knows."
"What the Hells does that mean?"
"That green light." He said and shut his eyes as if to ward it away, but only invited it back in his mind’s eye. "I need you to come with me."
"About the only place I'm prepared to go with you is medical." Leargam said and shook his head at the desolate bar. "Come with you. By the gods, what for?"
"There's an observation post across the surface a few miles, from the old days when the Concilium first landed here. Even before your time. I think we can find this ship out there, with the orbital telescope."
"You're having fun with me."
"You stuck with me up until now." Tezac said. "It's not far. We can use one of the HEVs from the depot, be back before sunrise. No one will miss us."
"There's not a thought in my head that ain't running the other way. But," He said and looked out across the calm, quiet common room and sighed through his nose. "I'll be fucked if I've got anything else to do. Waking up every hour or two as it stands."
Tezac smiled as much as he could and said, "I'll see you at the lift."
"Yeah," Leargam said as he vacated the booth and then called after him. "If I don't get second thoughts on the way."
"You won't." He said over his shoulder, and it was so.
Day 19: Predawn
They had made a bargain with the watchman on duty. Leargam told him they would not inform command of his proclivities with the diseased prostitutes that plied their trade from outside the wall if he could be relieved of only one Hazardous Environment Vehicle until dawn. It was agreed to in short order and Tezac climbed into the pilot's womb and attached its NervLink cables to their fixtures across his exo-suit. The old man did the same in the gunner's cockpit.
The watchman opened the blast doors matched to the space of the vehicle that they had commandeered and he flinched at the alarm that sounded beneath the flurries of the storm. The gate retracted as the red lights beside it spun. Ice crystals burst into the iron dark of the depot that could rend a man, but broke only against the unyielding stone and metal within. Tezac uplifted his hands gradually and thus put the HEV forth out onto the service road laser-cut into the ice beyond.
They rounded the curvature of the manmade gorge and came upon the gateway of Sector 10 that led out into town, beyond the safety of the prison. He rolled them to a stop before it and there they waited until a shadow had moved in the light of the booth atop its control tower. It watched them for some small moments, unmoving. Then the great doors parted their interlocking edges and groaned beneath the winds, of a different sort than nature. The shadow disappeared – gone back to sleep, they agreed.
The HEV pulled out into the first of the sprawl's cramped streets, the conglomerated hovels that crowded around them, and the gate slid closed behind them once its sensors had read them as gone. The road lay empty before them save for the shadows made by the neon paradise of its signs and that populated it always. They drove on through what was a shanty beside the magnificence of the installation that dominated all which lay behind them, the lights of its communcations arrays blinking in the tempestuous night. The automated ploughs their only company.
Soon any crude replication of life ended and gave way to the glacial wastes which enfolded it. The ice plains stretched out dark and lonely until they were consumed by the night-white of the storm, which roved across the land bitter and lowing its spite at the cruel forces that had begat it in the beginning of everything.
Tezac introduced them to its boundaries and they were taken into the nothingness its obscuration produced. He plotted their course on the womb's hardlight map display, connecting the moving blip that was their vehicle with the coordinates he had found for the old observation post. He guided them blind along the route and through the snowfall and the hail that shattered upon the thick armor of the tank.
The treads rumbled across the rocks and rifts of the terrain, followed the dips and curvatures of massive bowl valleys that seemed in some way that he could not place to house secrets. The way still lakes do in the grey of the morning, when the mist rises from the surface and suggests some rightly hidden place had now been found. But the rearing of sudden mountains into the headlamps of the HEV transported him back to the task at hand.
The nose of the craft dipped suddenly and an inestimable blackness broadened before them, the rock walls of the chasm hardly divested of the darkness before their light was swallowed. Tezac drew them to a stop upon the stony precipice and heard it crack beneath the tank's weight, watched the rock tumble free into the empty abyss. They dropped a short distance, as though the cliff had given way a little, and began to tilt forward and the hull of the tank to groan.
"Tezac." Leargam said.
"I know."
"Tezac."
"I'm on it."
He activated the repulsor modules along the floor of the HEV and it blew from the earth as though it had never been meant for it. It sailed askance as the winds blew about them, end over end, and then crashed into the rock of an outcropping on the other side. Tezac motioned them away to the right and they levelled out onto the glacier again, down from the mountain. Then on, they barrelled less across the planet surface.
Tezac shook his head and rode with the contours of the land‘s journey and said, "Close call."
"Try not to make any more." Leargam said over the wombs' frequency.
Soon a shape manifested from the blizzard under the light of the moons, a diamond of metal in the dark and overlooking the wide land from where it stood upon one of the few hills there. Tezac drew alongside it and ground the HEV to a halt, powered it down. They unhooked the NervLink cabling and ejected from the wombs. Tezac dropped to the ground from the opened hatch atop the vehicle and Leargam after him. Both brought their rifles to bear for reasons for which they could not account.
They trudged up the slope through the deep snow and circled round to the doorway that was ensconced out from the storm, tucked back within. It stood still a
nd silent at their approach and even more so as they came to stand before it. Frosted and barren of life as they were, the storm steadily consigning it to all that was forgotten out there in its embrace.
"No power." Leargam said and let the muzzle of his rifle drop, looked to Tezac. "Why would there be."
"There's a portable battery in the HEV."
"It won't help out here."
"Stand back." Tezac said and turned about and walked off into the storm.
"Where are you going?"
"Get the battery!" He called back and then disappeared into the snowfall.
Leargam looked after where he had been and then shook his head, made for the vehicle. He slung his rifle and climbed onto the ladder that led to the opened hatch and dropped down inside. The old man climbed through to the back and maneuvered around the auxiliary seat into the cargo hold. He rooted through the supply lockers therein until he stumbled upon a case stowed away in the last of them toward to the rear boarding ramp, closed against the winds. 'Emergency Self-Powered Generator', it read and beneath it: 'Warning: Temporary Use Only'. He put it under one arm and mounted to the interior ladder for the second time, emerged into the ice and eddies of snow in time enough to see Tezac bounding across the glacial earth and faster than he had ever seen a mortal being move.
There was a great clang that would have woken the world over had the storm not drowned out any noise but its own. He saw from atop the HEV Tezac stumble backward outside the cover of the gateway and then rest against its walls. He slid down the ladder at once and rushed over to him as soon as his feet met the ice. But all that was amiss with the giant was that the shoulder plating of his exo-suit was flattened and curled at the edges. Thus he looked to the gate of the observation post and saw where the doors had been forced to part, where they bent inward at the site of the impact.
Tezac approached them and pulled with all his might on either side, at turns. Slowly they were drawn far enough apart that he could get between them and in the narrow space brace his boot on the half before him and his shoulders on that which was behind him. The metal groaned as he pushed it along its track so, misshappen with time and the elements and finally in the last moments by its builders. They came to where they had been stoved apart and would go no further. Tezac relaxed into the wider ingress he had made and waved Leargam through.
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