“Nothing.” Leargam said.
“Not a godsdamn thing.”
“I'd tell you to use the transmission system but,” The old man said and shrugged at the dormant facility around them.
“Transmission,” Tezac said to the onboard computer of his helmet and turned away to face the hallway by which they had come. “Watch-Commander Kernes.”
“Hotchkins?” His voice said from the window that had opened upon his visor, darkened with the night and the man within it wiping the sleep from his eyes to squint into the meager light of the viewer. “Report.”
“This place is dead, Commander.” He said. “Did anybody report an outage down here?”
“No,” Kernes said and leaned away to manipulate something out of sight of the vidscreen a moment, then returned. “Power's still running through the conduits; must be a managerial problem. What are the details, Enforcer?”
“I just gave them. Staff is gone; no sign of a fight or foul play or native wildlife, what have you. Just cold coffee. Cold coffee is it in microcosm. When did you get that report?”
“Did you forget what I told you? Or do you just have too much shit in your mouth that I didn't quite catch you saying sir?”
“Requesting advisement, Sir.”
“Keep looking, dipshit. You think if there's not a welcoming party you just pack up and go home? You can't find them; well, it's a hell of a lot more important now. Do you even fucking think? Kernes out.”
“That punk.” Leargam said.
“Any ideas?”
“Not a one. Looks like there's another corridor ahead.”
“It leads into the access shafts for the geothermals.”
“I kindly doubt anybody is having a party down there.”
“It's a stretch.” Tezac said. “How much auxiliary you have left?”
“After the doors, about three quarters. Thereabouts.”
“I say we start popping coffins.”
“You take the upper and I'll take the lower?”
“What is your problem? A voice said to them from the darkness of the walkway above them and central to the forward heights of the chamber.
They looked up at its origin and bathed the man in the conical glow of their flashlights and found within them a short, pudgy man cut in the padded orange of his maintenance jumpsuit. A trail of smoke filtered from the tube of a chem-stick held between thumb and forefinger. He replaced it to the bushy mustache that drooped over his lips and smoothed the thinning brown of his hair. They gave one another a look and returned to the man who stood unperturbed of their light in his welder's goggles.
“What?” Tezac said.
“I said: what is your problem?” The man said. “I've been putting in these calls for weeks. I had to cut off the geothermal to the heating in Sector 10's mess hall just to get you guys down here. And all you can say is 'what'? Some bright young graduates we've got schlepping through the ranks these days.”
“Where is everybody?”
“Where is everybody.” The man said and flicked the chem-stick away down below and it tinkled along the floor to their right. “We're holed up in the main office. I hear weird things down here, man. Strange things. So, we're holed up in the office.”
“You've been hearing things.” Leargam said.
“Don't look at me like that.” The man said and they could see his hands tighten around the railing and he leaned slightly out over it. “You're breathing the same air as me. There's nothing wrong with me.”
“Hey. Buddy.” Tezac said and waved to draw the man's attention away from Leargam. “What have you been hearing?”
“What does anybody hear, stuck down here? I hear my name; I turn around. There's no one there and then just this little – little thing. This little thing. I turn the work light on, but the light don't move the way light should. You saw it.”
“We shouldn't have.” Leargam said. “What's the deal with the power?”
“We shut it down, pal. You go turn it back on; go ahead and turn the lights back on. I won't. They're not finding me. You do it. We already sent Tilden down to do it.”
“Where's Tilden now?”
“Well he's not in the office.” The man said and catalyzed another chem-stick in his fingers, dragged deeply on it. “I don't like being out here too long. Just take a look around, check things out. You got the guns; you're the big guys. You handle it. I'm going back inside.”
“Wait a minute.” Leargam called after him. “Where's you guy?”
There was no response and they heard a pair of what sounded heavy containment doors slide into place somewhere up above, in the dark.
“Blast doors on maintenance?” Tezac said.
“In case the reactor blows out.” Leargam said, his eyes still on that place where the man had been. “Do we check the shafts?”
“There's a man missing.” He said and took his rifle into both hands and started away away toward the corridor ahead. “We have to.”
They pursued the shadows as they fled before their flashlights and came to the triad of orbicular doors that waited there. Only the outer dome of that which lay in the center was parted and open to them, hanging lazily out of its locked position without the power to hold it shut. Tezac raised his rifle at the pitch that lay beyond and stepped through and Leargam followed suit behind him.
Each kept his eye to the sensor-scope atop his weapon as their flashlights unveiled what lay of the corridor ahead. It was all cold metalwork and old grime, draping wires and conduit stations that thrust out from the shadows to either side as so many looming ghouls of a bygone technofabric. Oblivious of their electromagnetic ghosts. Unalive with any sign of the life that had once sought to inhabit it. No heat signature, no heartbeat. Tezac could not keep his eyes from the piping that lay beneath the grating under his feet.
The corridor terminated ahead in the flat grey of a wall stenciled yellow with the words 'Access Shaft B' and the curvature of the bars of a ladder sat before them. Tezac stepped to the edge of the platform and peered down first with the sensor-scope and then with the full brightness of his helmet's flashlights. There was only an impenetrable darkness below that hummed with the great sprawl of machinery it concealed far beneath, but muted. As if in between there lay a depth needing to be sounded.
He shrugged at Leargam and turned about and began his descent of the ladder. His feet rang against the rungs and the old man waited until he passed out of mortal sight and climbed down himself. Tezac called up the visor's three-dimensional map of the maintenance level to track their progress and balked at the great distance there was to climb. Then his foot met with something below that stirred beneath its touch and went on doing so, at turns writhing and jerking and emitting tearing gnawing sounds. Leargam weakly kicked his shoulder.
“What the hell are we stopping for?” He heard above him and the movement beneath his feet quit.
Tezac said nothing, but looked down between his knees. His light shone across the worn legplates of his exo-suit and between them down onto some deranged thing of limbs, of sleek flesh and black eyes but to none of them a face. There was no such thing but passing vestiges that squirmed beneath the folds of skin in a silent agony that was without end. At the touch of the light it fixed its manifold gaze upon him and roared from some maw unseen that reeked and sounded with the dying cries of a thousand voices so that he felt sure it was to hell that he had descended. The innumerable limbs quivered and reared up so that the aberration bared its underbelly to him and he saw in that fleeting moment the ovular pit of jagged, rotted teeth and from which torn shreds of viscera and clothing hung. Then it spun awry and wormed its way beneath what it had rested upon, into darkness.
A mass of pulpy, fleshy cords lay below in its place and stopped up the shaft but for the space that the creature had squeezed between to escape. Bundled at its core were the fragmented remnants of a human life, naked and grown into the cocoon that had been vomited forth to encapsulate them. Here at a glance a hand and there an
arm or a leg bent awkwardly and at odds with itself from the bulge and and thus as his light fell across the amorphous globule there began an intense mewling. He tracked the terrible wail to its source and there found amidst the limbs and all other human attitudes of biology, bound and one with the organic ropes, a head and it addressed him in the only way its slowly dissolving countenance could then manage. There was a plea in the simple and infantile cries that issued from it and this most of all drove him back up the ladder to the platform above, swiping at and calling for Leargam to hurry in advance of him.
“What was that down there?” The old man said and Tezac collapsed against the wall.
“I don't know.” Tezac said and leaned over onto his knees. “I don't know.”
“What was it?”
“Whatever it is,” He said and straightened. “We've got to get rid of it.”
“Get rid of it.”
Tezac fixed his eyes on Leargam and said, “Kernes will want to know about Tilden.”
“Kernes; Kernes? What about Kernes? Is he here? You saw what I saw. You saw it.”
“You want to explain what we saw down here?” He said. “To these people?”
“Tezac.”
“We'll tell them we didn't find anything. Maybe he deserted; went out into town and died. I don't know.”
“What do we do then?”
“What kind of temperatures can these shafts take?”
“What kind of temperatures?”
“We'll burn it.”
“With what?” Leargam said and shrugged from where he sat against the wall. “You saw how big that poor son of a bitch was.”
“This is maintenance. Ought to be something down here that burns.”
The old man stood to his feet and the calls of the creature filtered up from the mouth of the shaft, as those of a man whose tongue has been cut out for speaking lies. Tezac gave the square of pitch and the ladder that upthrust from its reaches a last look and then started away with Leargam at his side.
“That thing better keep quiet.” The old man said.
“There's nobody to hear it.”
They returned to the offices before the elevator and went through the yet opened doors, one to either pair of quarters, and rooted through the storage lockers and bins stacked and arranged therein. A pile was begun in the atrium common to the rooms and in it was gathered a handful of tubes of lubricating oil; an electrode coupling; a small barrel of degreaser; and a spool of wiring. Tezac found Leargam standing beside the mound as he returned with this last, staring into it.
“Is this everything?” He asked.
“Everything.” The old man said.
“Is there a problem?” Tezac said and bent to work at the cache of supplies before him.
“That boy,” He said and then glanced off to the darkness of the corridor and the officorial chamber that lay beyond it. “And that thing. It don't sit right. Burning him up like this, like a hunk of garbage clogging up the incinerator.”
“You think he wants to stick around?”
“We can't cut him out? We can't get that Katherine or whatever her name is down here with a surgical laser?”
“Would you want to see this, any of this, if you had a choice?” He told him. “Besides: nobody can know about this but us. Ain't nothing to cut out, old man. That thing didn't just wrap him up, or maybe it did. At first. I don't know what it did, or what it even is.”
“So we'll just toss a firebomb down on it. Go back to Suzie's for drinks afterwards.”
“We don't have the luxury to care right now. Might be we've got enough time to quash this and that's it. People start asking questions and they'll get to thinking we either killed him or we went nuts.” He said and fastened the electrode coupling to the ends of several stripped wires cut from the spool. “And that's not even my primary concern.”
“There's a primary concern here?”
“Command gets wind of this and the port'll shut down. No port, no offworld shuttles. No offworld shuttle, we might as well go ahead and eat our guns while we're down here and out of the way. We need to get rid of Tilden."
"Get rid of Tilden, what,"
"Something's coming, something's already here.” Tezac said and took a light-disc from the bandolier about him and pried open the underside with the point of the knife. “We've got to leave, Leargam. Katherine and me, we're getting out the next transport that docks.”
“What about everybody else here, kid? You know how long I've been here? How many of these guys I know, whose families I know? You just showed up. Now I gave my eyes for all your bullshit already, and I'm not leaving my friends to die.”
“How many of your friends came and saw you in the MedVault? Huh, old man?” He said and affixed the trailing ends of the wires that looped about the fixtures of the coupling to those of the light-disc's miniature battery, leaving alone its control unit. “Know how many?”
“I was unconscious.”
“That's alright. I can tell you. Know why? Cause it was just me. Every night. Yeah, they were at Suzie's. Watching the new girls, boozing it up. I know it ain't always easy, the jams I've gotten you into; but you tell me now, who's really your friend on this shithole planet?”
Leargam stood by and watched as he stabbed the head of the canister of degreaser and spread the holes with the turning of the knife enough to drop in the wired tubes of lubricant so that five buoyed out of sight within the pungent liquid. Then he strapped the coupling overtop the punctured plate and the dismantled light-disc over that. A fountain of interconnected wiring tumbled down amidst the metal and tape.
“When's the next ship due in?” He said at last.
“In a week or so.” Tezac said and stood with the device in hand. “Maybe not at all if Command hears anything.”
“There's another option.” Leargam said as they made back for the shaft. “If that falls through.”
“What, take the lift by force and commandeer a frigate in the hangars in orbit? Fly out into space as free men?”
Leargam stopped and turned towards him and Tezac did the same.
“There's a smuggling ring out in the colonies, asshole. Once a month they launch a freight container out of an orbital catapult and there it sits until a bird comes in to get it. Guards at the monitoring stations get a cut to look someplace else.”
“We don't have a month.” Tezac said and tossed the bomb into the air, caught it again in the palm of one great hand and made for the shaft. “Barely got a week.”
“Next one is in two.” He said and started after him. “I figure whatever happens out here in the installation will take more than that to reach the colony. All we got to do is get reassigned to the perimeter towers out there and wait and hope this planet can slow these things down long enough.”
“We'll need a reason.” Tezac said and stepped to the edge of the maintenance shaft and at the appearence of their light the moaning started up again from below.
“We don't need shit.” Leargam said and came to stand beside him, shrugged. “We'll just do what we always do.”
“Make trouble.” He said and tossed the bomb into the dark below them and listened for it to thump dully against the mass of flesh within.
They heard it moan in some ethereal kind of confused horror. As if it were a force for pain blown across the planes and without physical limit. He placed his hand upon Leargam's shoulder and led him far enough away that the incendiary could not hope to cook them and then turned around. He held out his bracer and waved for it to activate and, glancing up at the shadows before them, navigated to the control relay for the light-disc. His finger hovered over the hardlight key and he peered hard into the heart of that abyss, illumined for the moment by their flashlights and host to a secret knowledge it would not divulge. He depressed the trigger.
A great roar issued from the mouth of the shaft and preceded a gout of red flame that shot up over the lip of the edge and rebounded from the ceiling of the tunnel to spill into it. Then it died away
and in its place all that there was was a faint glimmering of cinder across the blackened wall beyond the ladder, the quiet smoldering of the creature that had been suspended therein. Smoke rose from the pit and he was glad of his helmet to not smell its stench. Seeing it ascend and play weirdly in the light, he looked away and departed with Leargam.
Day 29
“Tomorrow's the day.” Leargam said and twisted his glass between thumb and forefinger upon the lighted bar, a bridge of white in the prevailing purple haze of Suzie's.
“Are you ready?” Tezac said, his voice rumbling barely audible beneath the blare and thrum of the music.
“Yeah.” He said and shot back what remained at the bottom of the tumbler, gritted his teeth at the burn and watched the girls upon the stage. “I don't know. Can you ever be ready for something like this?”
“I think you can come to terms with it.”
“Tough thing,” Leargam said and magnified his cybernetic view of the new dancer he had centered on, as if anything in that moment could make him think of something else, and then looked away. “Knowing what kind of jam you're leaving somebody in.”
“You get used to it.” Tezac said to the pitcher he held before him and then drained its dark contents.
He looked round at all the faces he had seen and saw now again the many that he did not know. He wondered what the old man saw and wondered more at what he felt, seeing them as he saw them now. It was easier in that way, but he knew pain was the ultimate siege device. In that moment he knew Leargam's thoughts and that they turned in upon themselves, for they were his thoughts too. But for him the disconnect was buried somewhere deep. There was metal and cable and the great human need in the way of meaning for the old man, and what was more it could be understood.
But the thing that called to Tezac called to him from across a great distance and when he answered it he found it was only an echo, ricocheting back to him from some unknown unsounded place. The sway of the dancers' bodies was the sway of weak trees in a high wind, the smoke of the guardsmen’s chem-sticks the old contrails of random aircraft.
Prisoner 52 Page 19