Satisfied, Sejanus threw away the head that he held and the Unionist to whom it belonged scrabbled blind and howling across the factory floor. Androsius fidgeted where he stood and faltered in his steps wherever he took one and looked upon him with a sort of dumb fascination. He approached him and the man whose knee he had broken shivered and groaned between them, looked upon the splintered bones and blood that he cradled without any mind for the world save its pain. Sejanus kicked him in his jaw as he passed and teeth flew free in bloody arcs and his neck snapped. He went to Androsius and took him by the collar of his vest. He whimpered. Sejanus pulled him along until he fell and then dragged him to where he had laid aside his tool bag and rummaged through it until he found the hand-welder.
"Please, soldier." He said. "Please, I'm sorry."
"So now I am a soldier." Sejanus said and activated the torch and took the bearded man up by his shaggy hair.
"Don't do this. Whatever it is you are going to do."
"Hold still." He said and through his cries that sublimated even the terrible drone of the foundry burned into his forehead the broken chain and open hands that comprised the mark of a traitor, an enemy to the state and people of the Conilium of Mankind.
"There." He said to him. "What do all these tattoos mean now? Everyone will know what you are. Go tell your friends. Your fun here is over."
Sejanus stood then and moved from him and Androsius rose stumbling over himself in his hurry and shuddering for his pain, ran off as a man does in the kind of abandon that comes with great fears that he knows only the direction of. The man who they had chosen for their entertainment entered his eyecorner and looked off at the Unionist and to Sejanus he might have looked at the passing of a bird, if birds fly in Hell.
"What was that about?" The man said to him and as though the end of one word were afraid of the beginning of the next, the beginning the end and dead as the stone and metal around them.
"Are you fucking with me?" Sejanus said.
"Tobias." The man said and turned toward him at last, but looked elsewhere, and offered his hand. "Tobias Simms. How are you called?"
"Sejanus." He said and took his hand and crushed the limpness of its grip, though there was no pain that came into his face.
"The other one." Tobias said and Sejanus looked past him at the one of Androsius's attendants who remained, the inmate who had first seen him and relieved himself in his lunch.
"Do what you want with him." He said and took his hand away and his eyes from the man standing furtively at the wall and then back to Tobias, who had still in the course of things to look at him. "Take care."
"I'll be sure to." He said and Sejanus left him standing there, staring off at an unknown point in the distance wavering in the heat of the factory.
Day 42
Jobaal watched the heads bob before him, those that were human. He marched amidst them when he could have flown, as the Khagani did when they could have been juggernauts. But these things did not occur to them. The Jedezian went on through the gloom of the broad corridor that for him was not so at all. The archway that led into the equipment room ahead appeared as under the light of day, and the holosign above it a sun that made itself indistinguishable.
He heard already the pound of the machinery and could smell the burning chemcial fumes. A haze overtook the air and all but the helmeted guards above began to wheeze. The pace picked up, never failing to. The filtration masks hovered before their eyes, watery now as the coughing fits began to wrack them. Jobaal's mandibles clicked together and shuddered with every breath of the noxious air. He could feel what was at work in his remade cells and wished almost that the deep inhalations he took, each day, would kill at last.
"Prisoner 192-10J!" An Enforcer called down and he looked up at the sound of his name. "Halt, and assume position."
The rail-turrets above him gyrated upon their lines along the ceiling and settled into place, barrels spinning and lasersights trained on him. A team of guardsmen streamed down the ladder from the walkway there and cleared their way through the teem of prisoners with the butts of their rifles. They scattered at the hits and thinned what remained of those heading into the factories. Jobaal stood alone and the Enforcers formed into a ring about him and drew it closed.
"I do not want any trouble." He said to them.
"Neither do we." Said the man who had spoken before, from atop the catwalk.
"Have I done something wrong?"
"Proceed to Courtyard 12, inmate."
"It is not Courtyard hours."
"It is now."
"Forgive me,"
"You're forgiven. Now get to Courtyard 12, or your escort will force you to."
Jobaal sighed as much as his people could, a huff of acrid wind out from his mandibles.
"What choice do I have?" He said and put out his hands as if he sought something from them.
One of the guards waved active the holodisplay of his bracer and navigated its interface to seal the Jedezian's hands together at the manacles about his wrists. So entrapped, they led him away as pygmies might have done in triumph to their village with a foreign giant. It was in vain to think of escape, he knew. He thought. The agents of the vast complex men like these had created across the galaxy multiplied as the hydras of old. There might have been an end to them, but it was no end a prisoner could make alone.
"There isn't one." The Enforcer atop the walkway called after him. "Take comfort in that."
They escorted him back through the access tunnels of the factory, dim with the failing overhead lights and dirty. Blood stained the walls, remnants of old executions he doubted served as reminders but that no one had seen fit to wash them away. Every ten paces or so the splotches of red were caught up in the sprawling murals of Arbitronix United's glorious conquest of the outermost rim of known space. Suns, always suns, that he would never see again which were not realized in the minds of others.
The opened gateway to the subterrenean magrail port materialized beyond the curvature of the corridor and he could hear again the endless drone of Master Control, going on interminably in the maxims of man and the swift retribution with which recent uprisings and violations had been met. The vast interior of the platform lay empty but for the rising steam of the grates along the walls, issuing from he knew not what but imagined it some lower hell they were yet to be condemned to. Its ferryman pulled into the station as if conjured forth from the blackness of the tunnel, its headlamps burning through the dusk of the manmade cavern of rusted steel like the eyes of a great worm that had made it its home.
He went silently to the dark, stocky hulk of the tram car and its doors whined as they slid open. The Enforcers behind shoved him along inside and took their places around him. They were forced to the hard metal benches once the transit got underway and the broad quad-barrels of their rifles stared him down from where they were laid across their laps. They remained in that way, no more alive than a portrait made of his people in bondage, until the train came noiselessly to a stop.
They went out into the receptory magrail port, dead as its mirror on the other side. Master Control spoke little here, and he could hear again their boots echoing against the grated floors. He looked to the ceiling as they walked him onwards and watched the water that dripped from the pipework. He listened to the whirr of the servo-motors of the Enforcers' exo-suits and counted how they matched to the thrum of his nerve clusters as if they were timing them out. They mounted to the steps that led to the door of station, lit from above by the holosign that informed on the schedule.
Their boots fell hollow in the corridor beyond. It was a long corridor that morning, and a longer one in that moment. The Arbitronix holomurals that cycled and changed to either side of him seemed now to gloat over him and taunt. The Enforcers stopped him before a thin door that was stuck into the wall not quite at the terminus of the hall and pounded on it. It slid open. They thrust him inside and between two guardsmen who flanked a narrow tunnel. The lift into which he was led at its end rattled
up the shaft. He marked the passing of each lamp with a calm that built in him, like the tossing of waves against the shore as the moon rises. Things he had never seen, would never know. Born to a desert planet, and condemned to fight in wars for territory inhospitable to all but the life that technology had made possible. Now he was here, upon Cocytus.
The cage doors opened and his escort brought him to a duplicate of the corridor from which they had come. They drew up to its single door and the man on his right scanned his bracer across the reader there and the door snicked open. Beyond were a cadre of their fellows and they thrust him out into their midst, but remained behind in the passageway themselves. The centermost of the new squad pointed with his head off to Jobaal's right and the Jedezian started in that direction, the Enforcers close at his heels.
He looked about himself and saw the high ceiling, packed with piping and wiring, and the great doors of the artery that ringed the ingresses of the recreation pods. There were no other prisoners on their march and above the walkways were absent of their sentries. He had never seen them vacate their higher world and indeed felt himself in a dream, the in tune banging of their steps upon the grating merely the compounded noise of his sleeping hearts. They stopped before the door into Courtyard 5.
"Why are we here?" Jobaal said to them.
"Surprise party." The man said who had directed him down the hall outside the lift. "Somebody's planned you a little reunion."
His fellows chuckled behind their helmets and he scanned his bracer across the panel beside the huge threshold.
"Welcome, Enforcer Penders. Designation accepted." Master Control said from the speaker. "Doors opening."
"In you go." Penders said and motioned for him to enter.
"What is in there?"
"Guys." He said and waved his men forward and turned away.
The squad of men crowded up behind him and hauled him forward and their exo-suits contended at odds with the strength of his people and the mutations done to it by the foreign conquerors that now thought to move him. Their servo-motors whined and their heels dug into the metal crosshatch they stood upon and Jobaal had taken into the air a man in one hand and threw him aside into the frame of the doorway when Penders, shaking his head, swept around and clubbed him just beneath the cranial plating with the butt of his rifle.
He fell forward dazed into the Courtyard and grasped feebly at the hot pain that seethed from the vulnerable tissue he had been struck upon. The Enforcers behind evacuated the threshold at speed and Penders set the door to closing. The Jedezian found his feet in a stumble and spun round to crash uselessly against the one partition that slid toward the other and he slid with it, falling to the floor again as the gateway sealed.
"Hello, bug man." A man said behind him and whose voice he knew, but was not relieved to hear.
Day 42
"If you're fixing to shoot me," Sejanus said. "Shoot me in the hallway here and spare me the suspense."
"Quiet, inmate." Penders said. "Nobody's going to shoot you. By the gods, we aren't even fixing to rough you up any. I'd sure love to. I'd love to put a bullet right between those eyes of yours. But I guess you can't have everything."
They stopped before the sealed gateway of one of the recreation pods and Penders swept round to the control panel beside its massive breadth, leaned upon the threshold to look at him.
"What's in there, lieutenant?" Sejanus said.
"Look at you." Penders said and snorted. "They ought to have put you all down the moment that war was over. You're an animal, even worse than that scum they bring in from the Outerverse. You put animals down when you don't need them anymore. When they get too old or too tired or too stubborn. I hear you like to tell people you're a soldier, that true?"
Sejanus didn't answer.
"No," Penders said and straightened from the doorway and turned to face the panel. "You ain't no soldier. You're just a dog. Outlived his usefulness. Some people got a nasty habit of keeping old dogs around, though; I don't know why. Out of pity, I guess."
He scanned his bracer across the reader and it thanked him and the door hissed where it split down the center. It started into motion and labored along its tracks into the walls. Sejanus caught a fleeting image of some grotesque of flesh and leather and black chitin in the far distance at the heart of the otherwise empty courtyard and then was thrown forward through the doors that began to shut in his wake.
"You're late, soldier." A voice called to him. "We were about to start with you."
Something exploded across the tip of his spine and he fell to the floor. Clubs laid into him where he curled prostrate and, bloodied and beaten, the men who wielded them hauled him up from the floor and dragged him forth. He saw as they went the group of Unionists ahead that held a Jedezian of unmistakable size at their feet and it looked about slowly, without definiton as though caught in a groggy dream. They neared enough from him to see the angry red mark upon the head of one of the men, the man who had spoken, and he knew him for Androsius. He brandished a knife absently in the air and Sejanus was brought to him. He bent low to face him and held the knife up to his eyes, caught in a red haze with the blood that ran down over him.
"You see what happens, eh? You, you understand now." He said and struck him across the face, once then twice. "You think you are outside; you think that because you are the victor out there, you are the victor in here? That you own our world inside these walls, too. This is a different world. A universe beneath the universe and inside it I am the victor. I am the one without reprisal. You watch. You will see; I will show you."
Androsius stepped away and around to stand behind Jobaal and twirled the point of the knife so that his men would haul the Jedezian up. Sejanus heard him mutter for them to get the wing out and watched the heavy goassamer unfurl from the exo-skeleton, its fine bladed edges glimmering in the diffuse light. He drove the dull knife into the silken tissue near its root at the Jedezian's shoulder. It howled suddenly and terribly, called back to the waking world as Androsius sawed through the wing and it struggled as if through a stasis field.
He came to the serrated bone that hemmed the wing overtop and could cut no more, though he tried. Sejanus heard him call for something as if through water and an old length of piping was put into his hands and with it he beat the chitin amidst the shrieks until it gave in a spray of acrid yellow gunk. He looked away when Androsius sidled round to the other wing and a hand roughly pulled him back and another held his eyes open to watch.
These figures resolved from the blur of the world and the noise they made seemed closer now, as though he had travelled the distance that had lay in between. He had begun again with the cutting and Sejanus grapsed for the words that his mind would know out of the senselessness that had been struck into it. The screeching of his friend spurred his thoughts to the enigma phrases of the thought-mantra for clarity, that the tumblers of his mind might fall into place.
The pipe was taken up and the fog brought on by his own beating wafted away. But his body remained fast and held from the torture that went on and, though he could struggle now against the men who held him, he decided all he had done was give himself a clearer picture of agony. He looked on at the breakage of the second wing's bones.
"You sons of bitches." He said and spat out the blood that had pooled in his mouth. "You sons of bitches."
"The dog speaks." Androsius said. "And to insult my mother. But of course I had a mother. Until we saw your assault barges up there in the skies. You must know: a soldier does not care if he dies, else he is not a soldier. But the ones he fights for, he must care about them. So here is one you care about. What shall I do with him next, eh? Should I cut out his eyes? Break off his mandibles? What? You tell me, dog too long in the tooth."
"Too long in the tooth." Sejanus said and looked away and the Unionists began to laugh, but he hardly heard them.
"Bring in the other one." Androsius said and he heard the gate groan open again behind him and the men who had boun
d the Jedezian went to receive the newcomer.
Their boots settled onto the floor before him and he looked up to see the man who had introduced himself as Tobias Simms standing with the Unionists. He looked about at that room as if the circumstances that surrounded him were of no particular note and only the novelty of new demesnes appealed to him. They took him away and the men who held Sejanus forced his eyes to where Tobias had been forced against the wall. Androsius followed after and spoke to him over his shoulder
"What should I do with this one, huh? Should I do what you inerrupted before?" He said and drew close to Tobias and aligned himself. "You enjoy this, eh?"
"I'll be sure to." Tobias Simms said and a strange thing passed over the face of Androsius and then his head detonated in a cloud of blood and bone.
The men who held Sejanus loosened their grip as they stared agape at the seizing, stumbling corpse of their leader and he bit down on the patch sealed into the inside of his cheek and released its dosage into his veins. A cold fire spread through him and burned along the channels of his circulatory system and started his heart to beating so that it was fit to burst. He was conscious of a roaring, but heard nothing save the rapid pound in his breast.
He broke free of the men who had their arms about his own and fell forward onto the floor and there spun over, put his boots into their knees. Blood spurted into the air beyond the bones as they splintered rearward and with a great snap like trees broken by the wind, heard for him like the hulls of ships blown out of orbit sinking and cracking beneath alien seas. They leaned into one another for support and Sejanus leapt to his feet and bowled them over.
He fell upon the one, beating and biting and tearing as the man screamed and fought beneath him and he screamed back at him. He felt the air move at his back and turned in time to intercept the kick leveraged at his head and pull from his feet the man whose leg it was. He broke it and climbed over the man who scrambled and shouted to his friends for help and then Sejanus commenced to beat his head upon the stone floor. They looked from the man whose face was gone and then to the man whose brains he was pounding from his ears and faltere. He rose from the corpses he'd made and made their decision for them.
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