“Conducting preliminary scans,” Master Control said.
Blue beams erupted from along the close, circular walls and above upon the domed ceiling and formed a hatchwork of light that ran across him once and then twice. The emitters were returned along the tracks to their rest positions and deactivated. He saw in their dying light the blood that had pooled beneath him. There was another noise overhead and it settled into a whine that then resolved into words.
“Severe trauma located: cranial; facial; bodily. Rectifying...”
The walls sprouted into churning machinery that he could only see in his periphery as vague shapes, cast as reaching monsters in the low light of the tube. A pair of pincers took him up by the wrists and raised him into the air, dragged his dangling feet through his own blood. He was brought to stare into the tiny screen that had deigned to show him light and saw therein the imagined face of Master Control, angular and obdurate and pale with unconcern – bathed in a tearing glow.
“Commencing maintenance sub-processes.” It said and he watched in his half-life the uncanny smoothness with which the countenance moved to form the words, never to resemble the imperfections of its model.
The mechanical arms that had arrayed themselves about him began to close in on him and he tracked their proximity with a growing fear that he could not give voice to. The prongs of the cutting laser stopped before his eyes and he looked on as their points brightened overtop his shattered nose. Below it the rotary saw moved into place and he could hear as though across a great distance its angry grind begin to build. He felt then the needlepoints of a dozen hypos pierce to his veins all across his body and knew that it was not for the pain, but for what the pain could bring his mind to do. A thing felt that had no use.
“Priming nano-fabrication units.” Master Control said and repeated until it had been done. “Sterilization of operating areas, commencing...; complete. Maintenance...commencing. Please standby for osteomechanical fixturing.”
Far away in the control booth, Zirdat was awoken. He listened as the wails of some animal, lost and wounded out in the sub-level, echoed through the silence and twilight beyond the window of the control booth. A revenant awoken in those catacombs and confronted with its fate.
Day 53
He got himself another drink from the dispensary on the counter and leaned onto its edge, tipped the shot back and set the glass down empty. The concerto went on behind him over the radio and somewhere out in the dark of his apartment, himself hid away in the light of the open kitchen. He stared forward at the wall before him and into a depth that only he understood, for all other darkling depths had been forever dispelled for him. There was a buzz beneath the tumbling orchestra that recalled his mind to him and he turned round on the blinking red light of the door panel as if just then becoming aware of its existence. He pushed the shot glass away with the tips of his fingers and went to it.
“Yeah?” He said into the transmitter.
“It's me.” Tezac said on the other end.
He leaned onto the door and sighed, rolled his jaw and then cleared the way as he keyed for the door to open upon the console. Tezac fit his muscled bulk through the threshold and the door slid closed behind him.
“You got cleaned up.” Leargam said to him. “We heading somewhere?”
“Got a look at myself is what I did.” He said and turned round at the bar, leaned back onto it and crossed his arms. “But no, no brothels tonight.”
“Then why aren‘t you sleeping? Shave all you want, but that face of yours still looks like a pile of shit if you don't sleep.”
“You're a barrel of laughs tonight.”
“I know it.”
“There’s some things we need to discuss.” Tezac said and the old man nodded to him. “We've got one way out of here. And to to get at it, it can't be a few towers in a few sectors. This place was built too smart.”
“I best get back over to the dispensary.” Leargam said and moved toward him, then round to the counter's opening. “And if you're about to tell me we've got to figure out how to free up tens of thousands of inmates – at once – hells, I'd do well to stay as near as possible.”
“Then you'd better do it for both of us.” Tezac said and watched the liquor pour out the nozzle into the glasses, one after the other. "We have to get Master Control to release all the prisoners at once, and if we can’t we have to destroy him."
"You know that'll deactivate just about every defense we have here." Leargam said and set down the second glass he held and Tezac took it. "This is a lot more than just leaving people behind, kid. And how do you think we're going to get off this shit heap ourselves?"
Tezac looked down into the cup, into the amber glow of it beneath the dim light above the counter, and then drained its contents. He looked at Leargam, Leargam back at him, and he set it down onto the counter.
"You think it'd help us." The old man said. "You think it even understands gratitude anymore. You’re talking about releasing godsdamn everybody then, even it."
"I'm listening if you’ve got a better way to slip through a thousand pissed off convicts."
"You want to take the installation’s only safeguard offline and then let loose a Maerazian warlord on whoever’s left." Leargam said and looked at him. "Do you have any notion of how crazy you are?"
"I don’t hear you saying no."
"There isn’t much else to say that makes sense." He said and looked over the glass in his hand as if to find some imperfection there only his eyes could see. “I did a little of that research you wanted.”
“Find anything?”
“Four guys.” Leargam said and took himself and his shot round the bar to the common area, before the holotable. “Took a while, the hundreds of arrivals that came in that day.”
The old man sat down in one of the plastic couches and waved the desk active. Its blue display crackled and sprouted into being before him in the air and Tezac came to sit down in the chair beside him. Leargam brought into view the records of the inmates he selected and Tezac saw at once the difference. The three that enrounded the fourth were at once haunted by some inscrutable, unseen horror and knew in some way that they were its harbingers. New arrivals to the conditions on Cocytus and in gruesome debut.
“Tobias Simms.” Leargam said and indicated the fourth man. “Mental screening returned perfect; Master Control's interrogation, same thing. Might as well be headed for a Euphor-world.”
“Where's he coming in from?”
“He was part of a mining operation on Kyrgis 3, standard day labor.”
“That's far out. Barely still in the Outerverse.”
“Far out as you can get and still traffic in CorpBucks.” He said and tapped Simm's photo, enlarging the file to a more detailed view. “Sterling employee according to his work records, until a couple months ago. He put some kind of gas in the vent system, knocked everyone dead out and long enough to haul every single one of them into the mess hall and tie them all up. Skeleton crew, few families. Maybe forty, fifty people. But every hour after they woke up he'd come in, take somebody out, another hour'd go by and it was somebody else. What the rest heard, I don't know; he didn't leave any survivors, not even his own wife and kids. But judging from the medical report it was the infirmary he dragged them to and I don't need to tell you the rest.”
“He was waiting for the security team when they got there?” Tezac said and looked from the text of the Provost's report to Leargam, then into the clear green eyes of the man in the photo.
“That's not even the best part.” The old man said. “You keep reading. Wait til you get to the marks on the bones.”
“This is our guy.” He said and studied the slight upturn of his mouth, his broad clear features that in some other universe bred trust. “I might as well be looking at some functionary's holobadge, but whatever is going on with that ship it has to do with him. How long have you spent on this?”
“Long enough.” He said. “Since we talked it over.”
“That why those bags are under your eyes?”
“Ain't the half of it. Part of it maybe.” The old man said and set his glass down on the holodesk and rubbed his face with both hands, leaning on his knees. "Maybe it's the implants; closing your eyes ain't the same as turning them off."
“I know.”
“And I guess you get used to it.”
“Maybe.” Tezac said and got up, made for the door through the shadows and half-light of the holoprojection.
Then the old man watched the light spread across the floor and he watched the kid's big shadow disappear into it, watched the closing door smother it. He threw the shot glass against the far wall and heard it clatter to pieces against it, the shards to the floor. The old man sat in the music that was his silence. He touched gingerly the black metal around his eyes and pored across the floor in staccato magnification and the night wore on, as it does.
Day 54
"We need to see him." Tezac said and Katherine jumped at his sudden apparition, Leargam beside him.
"Who?" She said and excused herself from the other medical technicians around the MedSlab who guided its operations upon the inmate it housed.
"The other one, that was there in the Courtyard with Sejanus. Tobias Simms."
"Why?" She said and narrowed her eyes at him. "He isn't affiliated with any of them. I don't know why he was there at all."
"He might know something." Leargam said and stepped forward, indicated his eyes with thumb and forefinger. "Please, Katherine."
She looked between them and frowned and said, "Alright. But I can't promise you'll get much out of him."
"Why not?" Tezac said and followed after her when she turned to go, making for the doors of the isolation ward on the far side of the medical bay.
"He came in seizuring." She said as she went along. "Babbling nonsense until he started lashing out enough that we had to restrain him in psych-iso."
"Sounds like our man." Leargam muttered to him.
They stopped at the interlocking doors ahead that read crosswise along their frame as those leading into Psychological Isolation and Containment and she went to the panel beside it, waved its hardlight interface active. She submitted her technical credentials to it and then supplied her biologicals and the doors hissed open. She stood to the side to let them pass and they filed into the corridor beyond, on through the dim columns of light that fell down at intervals between the isolation cells set along the walls.
Katherine followed behind them and directed them through the ward to the room which contained Tobias Simms. They backed away from it without peering through the observation port, that she might enter the code to open it. She did so unbidden and jumped at the klaxon blare of the display when she depressed the wrong holokey and started again until at length it flashed green and the door slid open.
A cold washed out over them and a damp came across their skin that chilled them to the bone. Katherine backed away to the wall behind the two Enforcers and they advanced in her retreat and looked hard into the darkness beyond. Then they looked at one another and Tezac first crossed the threshold, his boot echoing on the other side as if it were a sphere of bronze dropped into deep caverns that had not known sound since their carving out.
"You sure about this?" The old man said.
"Nope." Tezac said and stepped full across the threshold, from one realm of understanding into another.
Leargam went in his wake and passed through the doorway and shivered beyond it, as if it had been the ingress through the wall of a glacier. His breath froze in the air and yet the wall behind him was as warm as the plating of his suit when he touched it. It seemed to him as like fabled Night, when all grows cold and even under the scrutiny of light the shadows move and hate. But if Tezac felt the same as he, he did not show it. The big man advanced deeper into the room no more cautious than if it were any other.
There was a light that appeared then, as if a black cloak had hung across the entrance to the cell and then had been thrown away, and the light of the three moons lanced through a narrow window high atop the wall to their left and onto the top of a table at the center of the room. Beyond it was sat a figure in shadows that clung to the glow as if hungry for the life it could offer and jealous of those others that had come and could challenge them.
"You are Prisoner #1852, Tobias Simms?" Tezac asked the figure.
"I am a prisoner." He said. "Beyond the throne of life, of warmth and light."
"This guy is just crazy." Leargam said and placed his hand on Tezac's shoulder. "Look, let's get out of here."
He took the old man's hand away and said, "Why are you here?"
"I killed a man." The man said and his head moved in the darkness so that he looked at them, though they could not see his eyes, and with such mechanical fluidity and precision that they fidgeted. "And I ate his flesh."
"What do you know about a ship?" Tezac went on. "In orbit."
"It has come for me." The man said and looked up at the light that streamed in through the window; his face passed through its rays and they saw the tracks of his tears glisten upon his face. "To take me away from this place."
"Crying?" Leargam said at Tezac's ear.
"He weeps." The man said. "He weeps always."
"Who?"
"Why are you here."
"What is it?" Tezac said and leaned onto the table and into the domain of a foul stink familiar to him, of darkling depths filled with the rotting dead of corpse worlds. "What is the ship in orbit?"
"It is the author of my journey. The witness to my transcendence."
"Where did it come from? Why are you here?"
"It is the nature of life to die. Time to pass. Life dies and time passes. All devoured, all come to the nothingplace in which I dwell. The Gods will never molest Man, and Man will never eat his Gods."
"Who are you?" Leargam said and scrutinized him through the gloom.
"I am the Eater." The man said and the light that came from the window flickered and the noise of lonely waves filled their ears as if from a far off alien distance and they were thrown from their feet by the sudden sound of his voice, though it neither raised nor shouted. "The Eternal. That Which Quakes and without end. The Green One. The Unyielding Blight of Worlds. Emerald King and Dredger of the Depths. My names are many and my servants are as great. I am Quodath and you will walk within my flesh."
"Attention." Master Control said over the broadcast system, echoing himself where the noise of one transmitter met another, and the lights out in the hall turned a foreboding red. "Hostile element detected. All personnel report to assembly areas immediately. Attention."
They scrambled to their feet and still the man sat in darkness, unmoved. The shadows coiled at the edge of the light, of the window and of the bloody glow of the hall, and Leargam danced away from the gleam that rolled towards his boot through the twilight of the overhead lamps in the hallway. The blackness began to gurgle.
"Come on." Tezac said and stepped backward out into the hallway.
"What about him?" Leargam said and pointed at the man with his thumb.
"Fuck him. Let's go." He said and was off down the corridor, the old man following swiftly after.
"Well?" Katherine said as they came again through the door.
"Come on." Tezac said and grabbed her by the arm and pulled her along with them. "We've got to get you someplace safe."
"What happened in there?" She said and glanced between them as they went. "Is that what the notice was about?"
"Is there anywhere on this station that's secure and not a cell?'
"Residential." Leargam said and shrugged. "Armory, maybe. Best bet is probably going to be her quarters, kid."
"Yes," Katherine said. "Take me there; take me to my quarters. I'll be alright there."
But Tezac shook his head and said, "I don't know if anyone will be alright anywhere."
Day 54
The jungles swam before him and their jungle sounds rose and fe
ll like the tossing of tempestuous seas, the colors with them in jumbling sprays of madhouse pictures. He saw the underbrush filled with the corpses of men taken in by the planet which owned to a hunger unable to be sated and the sharp bone-tan of trees splintered by the passing of Khagani ramming crews where the jungle was too dense for armored columns. Aged fathers of verdancy reduced to leaning broken pillars like ruins, but that its ruiners and discoverers were one and the same people.
He ran through the mists of the deep forest and beneath the eternal night of the thick canopy and the sometimes twilight of the stars beyond them both. The damp fogged his visor and his legs wheeled under him as though they touched the ground only as a mere pretence and spirited him along over the roots and amidst the trunks of the vast trees around him as if he were the embodiment of speed. Here he hid in the underbrush, there he stole onward through the tall grass in the clearing. A sentry, blown in two by his silenced cannon. Another ahead he decapitated with his longblade. Then deeper, then astray. Then caught in the daylight by surprise, by always ravenous sallow faces with eyes too large and mouths too wide and taser rifles crackling like heralds of what awaited the captives they were designed to subdue.
Voices over the comms channel, his own among them. His voice in the dreamscape some alien thing, far away and predetermined. The patrols closed in around him and he looked above for the clearing lasers of a canopy lander. A voice over the radio. Someone had spotted him and he knew that they had not, for he saw no one. He tried to tell them so and cried out to him who spoke the words, to answer him. But he went unheard. He was left among cannibals, and made of them food.
The men of whose flesh he had tasted to survive on that terrible world passed before him along the trails he knew he had marched in the long ago, at the outset of this campaign of movement and slaughter, and they followed the passage of the Concilium's roving march across the jungle surface back to its source. Their howls were at his back and he became watchful to the point of insanity. Themselves the least of the planet's repertoire of illimitable ways to torture and to mutilate. But the shadows that moved in the night. In them it was his special terror to search for what no right mind desired to witness and what were the masters of that people on Taan, they for whom no man approached the rivers in the jungle or the watery loamy depths into which they emptied.
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