And a blandness settled on him, a longing for some other realm beyond this one that he knew to be only illusory, and in such moments he thought that space-hauler due to land that time tomorrow was his chariot to it. But a keening laugh or an inane attempt at humor and it was the old hatred as familiar to him as his name, as clear and real as the rock and stone of the oldest worlds. Perhaps it is so with all men, that over time what makes them men withers away without anything to nurture it and so falls prey to what makes them beasts. That which finds fertile ground for planting in all places.
“You find anything in those maintenance logs?” Leargam said of a sudden and recalled him from far off.
“I couldn't,” Tezac said and leaned forward onto the bar with his elbows, stared into the brightness of the countertop and breathed deep through his nose. “I couldn't access them.”
“You couldn't access them.”
“They know. Somebody knows. I need another drink.”
“Then tomorrow is a gamble.”
“I'd call it a shot at a few thousand meters. In bad weather and with a worse rifle. But it's your choice.” He said and punched in the code upon the menu screen for another pitcher.
“You know how expensive that shit is, don't you?”
“They only know something. Not what we know. Not exactly, so I think. But I can't say if it'll be enough to shut down the station.”
“Have you given much thought to how we're supposed to get to the damned station in the first place?”
“Take an HEV out to the orbital lift.” He said and wiped the froth from his lips. “Ride it up, and we're done.”
“That simple, huh?”
“There was a uniformity to all the logs. There wasn't anything reported, not anything in that volume, until a few weeks ago. Nothing. Not a godsdamned thing. For months.”
“That ship's been out here,” Leargam said low and calculated the figures invisible along the shelves of empty bottles on display behind the bar. “For longer than that. And we were out at that – that,”
“I know.” Tezac said. “It isn't the ship, even if it involves the ship.”
“What are you saying?”
“We ought to check the arrival logs. See who was brought in that day. Prisoner transports, all of it.”
“That'll take some time. And some doing.”
“Limit it. The person we're looking for: he won't be like the others. He'll be out of place. No prior convictions. No gang affiliation. He might even be in for something like a psychotic break, but so violent they couldn't have sent him anywhere but here.”
The old man shrugged and said, “Should we be looking at that Maerazian son of a bitch we hauled in?”
“I've fought the Maerazians.” Tezac said. “Border raid near the Tyrehean systems, and the things I saw in that battle,” Tezac said and nodded his head as he peered into the thick, black liquid before him in the pitcher. “But this isn't them. Now if you're going to ask me, then I'm going tell you to go back to your quarters and start praying it's Maerazians. That or put one through the roof of your mouth and call it quits.”
“Well I'm asking, and I ain't praying. Or shooting.”
“It might be worth asking instead: what's an Exodus Age, anything near that old, doing this far into Concilium space?”
“You think they're on the run.”
“I think it might explain the upswing in border activity GalNet's been reporting.” Tezac said and hefted his drink, inspected it. “You wanted my opinion, so there it is.”
“Maybe we ought to be thinking about what to do.” Leargam said and scanned the faces clustered about the stage and lit diffusely by the pink lights there, listened to the isolated laugher and dull murmur of a dozen different conversations. “If that transport doesn't come through, Tezac,”
“It'll come through.” Tezac told him. “Shouldn't be worrying about that.”
“Well I wish I had your confidence, kid.” Leargam said.
“What confidence.” Tezac said and smiled around the edge of the pitcher he then drained and set down, empty, and followed the old man's eyes. “You going to miss this place?”
“A place can mean a lot of things to a man.” He said. “Specially when it's seen him young and it's seen him old and he's gotten to know the difference. I guess I'll miss what it used to be, but that place's been gone fifty years now or more. Nothing left here for me, I guess; nothing that's still mine anyway.”
Tezac could feel the slow creep of the alcoholic buzz peal back from its line of advance and in its wake he sensed a veil to be dropping down over him. A dense fog that could turn the most vibrant and teeming forest to a dark, foreboding wood that concealed the deep melancholies of outcast gods and beasts. It was the mist that was with him always and had taken a dusk to a golden day, obscured whether that day had ever really shone at all or was merely a dream. Something dreamlike, tied to no place or thing. A constant garden for the darkest of musings.
His bracer trilled and shocked him from his reveries with a shake of the head, as though his body had been the only true thing about him and his mind had gone on to distant pastures. He looked down and squinted into the cerulean light of the screen hovering before him and accepted the incoming transmission. He held the wristband out before him and the holoprojection erupted from its tiny bulb and hovered in the air above it, steadily receiving the feed. Kernes's face resolved from the scattering of light particles and Tezac felt a part of himself die slow.
“Evening, boys.” The Watch-Commander said.
“We're off duty.” Leargam said over the blare and thump of the music.
“I don't know if I'd want you on duty, how much two have been drinking.”
“What's this about, Kernes?” Tezac asked.
“You've got a special invitation, asshole.” He said. “Call me by anything less than Sir or Watch-Commander again and I'll drag the disciplinary squad out of bed to flog you on the spot. I figured a veteran would have understood something so simple.”
“A special invitation?”
“You are to report to,” Kernes said and began reading off another screen to his unseen right. “Garage 12, Sector 10 for overland transport to the orbital lift. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Sir.” Tezac said and poised his finger over the disconnect key. “Hotchkins out.”
He depressed the holokey and the display winked out. He let fall the bracer slowly and looked off into the nowhere between the feet of those milling about the stage and then up at Leargam. He studied the old man's iron eyes, the red dots that dwellt what seemed deep within, for what seemed to him an age and within them read what were his possible fates. Then he took a breath, the first in a long moment.
“What could that mean?” He asked him.
“There ain't much in the way of command up there.” Leargam told him. “All that's planetside. I figure if they were shipping you out there'd be a bit more ceremony to it, probably talk with the EC first.”
“Am I walking into some kind of fix?”
“Special invitation, orbit.” He said and shrugged. “I say the Overseer wants a word. You better enjoy that pleasure-barge he's got up there as much as you damn can, for all of us stuck down here. Captains don't get asked up there, maybe one or two all the time I been here. Euphor world with thrusters behind it, that's what that is.”
“If he wants to see me, it isn't to treat me to a good time.”
Day 29
The lift screeched to a halt and shuddered against the suspension columns beneath. The doors opened and he was blinded by the light that shined full on him of a sudden, held his hand up against it. About him flowed his own beacon of light within the lift and between these two that engulfed him there was only the darkness and chill of the garage. A pair of shadows manifested to either side of what now appeared to him as the headlamps of an HEV. He stepped down off the lift and stepped forth, squinting at the white light that crept through the spaces of his fingers.
“You Hotchk
ins?” A voice called to him over the roar of the storm that raged beyond the opened gateway he saw to loom behind the light.
“Who wants to know?” He shouted back.
“My rifle up your asshole.” The man said and Tezac could see the silhouetted angle that was his elbow shift into firing position. “Get in the vehicle.”
He had only his pistol against their two guns, but his hand moved toward it all the same. He thought of who could be sent to escort him if Leargam was right and it was the Overseer he was gone to see. He wondered if they could hit the head off a moving target and in a dark garage, if he could make it into the shadows before they had the chance to fire. They would kill the lights and activate the night-sight of their helmets, but in that time he was confident of placing two rounds through the visors. He looped his thumb through his utility belt instead.
“Alright.” Tezac said. “Kill the lights, huh?”
The dual glow evaporated and he watched the headlamps fade from dim yellow discs into nothing. He could see now the driving snow and ice that blew nearly sidewise in the force of the winds outside. But in the foreground of that wintry aspect he saw the gleam of gunmetal and the rifles that were levelled at him. He approached and paid them not a second thought.
“The Overseer sent you?” He asked them as he mounted to the ladder that led to the passenger's hatch.
“In a way.” The man nearest to him said, clad in black armors and invisible behind a blacker helmet, and with his rifle trained on him as he climbed. “Port security.”
“Impressive security.” Tezac said from the roof and bent to pull open the door.
“We've had some resupplies.”
“Any idea what he wants with me?”
“I ain't paid to ask questions.” The man said and jutted his rifle muzzle at the opened hatchway. “Now get inside and secure yourself.”
Tezac nodded to himself and slipped down into the narrow opening and reached up to shut the door behind him. Once inside he restrained himself within the armored chair and heard the men climb to their own hatches outside. He listened for the dull thumps of their closing and then waited as they engaged both the pilot's and the gunner's wombs that not so long ago and in other circumstances had housed Leargam and himself for another such expedition. One that had been bought with the price of his friend's humanity, and so he looked down and to his own unfeeling hand. Then the HEV started into motion.
He could feel and know without seeing the uneven, rocky grade of the glacial terrain and felt his stomach rise and fall with the engagement of the repulsor modules to sail over what was to him some imagined abyss. It was a long going to constant motion, constant shuddering across the barren and icy wastes. The wind howled sometimes of a sudden and blew the vehicle about along its track and he conjured into his mind what he could not see beyond the dim steel around him as the wail of some roaming and gargantuan beast whose passing had thrown them. A deep lowing that sounded for no purpose familiar to humankind and that shook the earth. Perhaps it was the planet itself, pleading with him.
The HEV rolled onto the slight incline of a ramp outside and he heard through the metal and storm a gate loudly powering open. Then personnel carrier shot forward again in fits and starts until the ice crystals no longer sounded to shatter against its hull. The gate closed again in their wake and the powerful engine died, its equipment with a lilting groan. He undid the fastenings that bound him to the chair and stood to throw open the hatchway and then climbed out again.
He stood in the darkened vehicle bay his escort had pulled into and listened as they disembarked themselves, looking about himself. The two men in their black and sleeker armor took post behind him and so assembled they moved out onto the incline of the garage bays, up into the vastness of the orbital lift's ground station.
Tezac looked across the emptiness that lay between them and the elevator itself and felt more than he did on arrival that it was the gatehouse of the Wayland itself. He knew not how far its circumference went into the shadows beyond it or how high it stood from floor to distant ceiling. Only that next to it he was a little man of little capability. His eyes followed the light of the amber lamps high overhead to where it glinted off the great rollers that would bear the elevator up along the cable. From that height he found past it and to the left the station's windowed control booth, set above them upon the wall, and the shadow of the man within.
“You got something for me?” A voice crackled over the station's broadcast system.
“One to go up.” The escort said over the channel of his helmet's comms array.
“You'll have to wait, boys. Got a shipment of goons coming down to replace the ones we lost the last few months.”
“It's clearance level 5.”
“Overseer priority or not, it won't make that lift come down any faster. Have a seat, boys; stay a while. You might like it here.”
“Collegia browbeaters.” The other of his two escorts said so only they could hear and Tezac pivoted where he stood to give him a look. “You got something to say, peasant?”
“Not yet.” He said.
Lights began to flash atop the walls and then to cast their red light in revolving cones across the chamber to the sound of the klaxons that had started up. The voice of Master Control announced to all present the imminent arrival of the tactical orbital lift and a hatchway irised open far far above them, an eyelet inset amidst the pair of greater and more massive blast doors around it. The elevator was not long dropping in through the opening that then closed behind it in its wake.
It was small, many times smaller than what it was in miniature, but greater still than perhaps the entirety of the mess hall of Sector 10. He had arrived first, he remembered dimly, in a hibernation fugue upon the outer and larger of the two lifts; for he had not come as a replacement as these men had, to be a part of the reinforcements. It gave him pause to consider who it was they were becoming and he wondered then if he would not see the same look upon their faces as he had seen vacating the emergency landers of the Ersatz auxiliaries upon a hundred separate battlefields.
The outer doors of the greater lift slid open and filled the air with the echoes of its machinery booming and creaking through the crepuscular station. Figures appeared within the light that filtered out from within and then resolved into men as they trooped down the gangway before them. They made for an HEV that a pair of men was then directing them toward on the far wall and Tezac looked at the unspoiled crisp jumpsuits and the fresh clean-cut faces that he was surprised to see on that planet; they at him and his exo-suit, worn upon issue and worn the more since, and the pale rugged mask of his face. There was a question in their stares and he wondered if they thought him an inmate. Then they passed on and turned their backs on him and advanced for their own transport going the way he had come. He, theirs.
“She's all yours.” The man in the control booth announced.
Tezac started forward before his escort could say what he knew they would and listened for their footfalls as they followed suit a moment later. The distance he traversed seemed to elongate the more he made of it and came no nearer for him until his boots rang against the loading ramp. He passed beyond the ingress of the airlock and onward into the vast rotunda of the primary elevator, glancing across the tiers upon tiers of personnel restraints along the walls. A small doorway awaited him across the way on the far wall and two men drew up behind to direct him through it.
He found himself within the tactical lift buried at the heart of the elevator major and looked about himself at the walls that were in no way narrow but appeared constrictive beneath the immediate shadow of its host. The seating, tiered again as before and hardly more than harnesses, could fit two squads but no more than that. Tezac mounted to the ladder nearest him and took it to the highest seat upon the end and lowered the restraints into place. The small forms of his escort below strapped themselves into the seats across from him amd with their feet still able to touch the floor.
“Orbit
al embarkation engaged. “Master Control said. “Please ensure all passengers are securely locked into place and that any possessions are secured. Insubordination could result in pay demerit. Please remember: a cleanly life is a pure life.”
Day 29
The doors of the airlock parted before him, a line of crooked teeth that sank back into the walls to either side. The far door had already been opened for his coming and beyond it he could see the crystalline light of a gravchalier, below it a sort of foyer of bright wood and plush leather chairs. He craned his neck about and saw on the walls paintings, but there was no holographic glimmer to them; real canvas and real paint upon them, things in their combination unheard of. Tezac gave a last look to the field of stars outside the plastic boarding umbilical and the airlock of the space station that terminated its other end. He approached the threshold between the spare gloom of steel and polymer and the warm opulence that lay ahead and crossed into the latter.
There was a brief, tinny flutter of some wind instrument that played out into the air, from where he could not tell, and it stopped him where he stood. The orchestral piece then began in earnest and in the cadences of some tune that he once knew, but had since forgotten. He looked up at the crystals of the gravchalier that floated near to the vaulted ceiling and then to the painting that flanked him in the entrance hall.
They described scenes of ancient origin. He knew only the one and that of the assault on the mountainside bastion of the Sun God in the ancient mythic life of Man's homeworld and prosecuted in legend when he was yet young. The other, to his right, was only a portrait and of a man in black robes and blacker cuirass and skull cap; behind him, purple curtains blew across pale stone and painted to his right was a pedestal and upon which a skull was set that his hand rested upon. Tezac studied the man's eyes, the chill depths that called to him from across the ages, and the grim face that they were housed in. 'Welcome', they seemed to say, 'for I know your ilk, and once thought myself beyond them'.
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