Janus looked slightly abashed, and then sat down, grumbling, on a piece of ceiling debris, “Fine. Do whatever you want.”
Celes remained on edge, “Good, I’m glad to know you don’t always act like an arrogant idiot.”
Wouris chuckled from her spot against the wall.
“What are you laughing at?” Celes snarled.
Wouris stopped chuckling, “Nothing, nothing at all.” But a smile still lingered on her lips.
She walked the room while Celes worked, stopping to stare at a pipe that ran vertically along the wall, “Hmmmm.”
“What?” Janus asked – wincing as Celes wrapped his torso.
“This pipe – it’s an old water line, but it’s dripping. There must be an intact power and water source somewhere down here. It’s amazing that it’s still running,” she said reflectively, turning back to them, “Toss me your waterskins – I’ll fill them up. We should stay hydrated while we have the opportunity.”
Janus gingerly pulled out an empty sack with a filter on the end from his armor and tossed it to Wouris. She found a valve along the pipe and filled the three skins, tossing two of them back to Celes. The water was cool and refreshing, and tasted good.
After Celes bound his ribs, Janus stood slowly and walked over to the half of the room that had entirely collapsed, looking for more supplies. He felt much better, and no longer quite regretted every breath, but he kept silent, instead letting his flashlight roam over the huge wall of broken tristeel and plasment. It was like a whole building had sunk into the ground. “Looks like most of the dry goods were crushed, so we don’t have any extra food.”
Highlighting a small hole at the base of the wall, he held his flashlight steady. “Hold on, there might be something behind here.” Janus got to his knees and peered into the darkness. The light from his flashlight was quickly swallowed up within the space.
Celes and Wouris joined him, adding their light to his. The space stretched to a small tunnel. “Well, let’s check it out!” Celes said excitedly, her discontent gone at the prospect of adventure.
“Do you think that’s the best idea?” Janus glanced up the wall.
“Well, we might need supplies, and who knows what else might lie in this bunker? Besides, this passage hasn’t collapsed yet!”
Janus glanced at Wouris. She looked skeptical, but shrugged, “She might be right.”
“I’m the smallest, so let me see if I can squeeze through first,” Celes said. She handed her rifle to Janus, attached her flashlight to her ear and, crawling on her hands and knees, crept into the hole. She called back to them, her voice faint.
“It is really tight back here. You’ll have to remove your S.T. armor Wouris. There’s no way you’ll fit through with it on. It looks like it opens up afterwards. Hold on.” There was a pause and then, “OK, I’m through.” Another pause. “Now, this is interesting. You may want to come take a look at this.”
Janus and Wouris glanced at each other with interest, and he quickly helped her out of the armor. Soon they too were crawling into the hole, the light disappearing behind them as the tunnel twisted and turned through the wreckage. Dust rained upon them and Janus glanced skeptically at the roof of the passage. Finally they emerged into a dimly lit room. Janus looked around for a light source, and finally located it on a small panel sticking out of the wall, adjacent to another door. But this door was totally different from the ornate, ornamental affairs of the rest of the bunker. It was much larger, and extremely solid, capable of withstanding a huge blast. And it simply bore the Phoenix Corporation emblem, an imposing fiery bird rising from the flames with its wings outstretched. The adjacent panel was damaged, a large hole in it. A twisted piece of concrete and steel debris lay nearby.
The three moved forward together to examine the door, and the glowing panel sprung to life. It spoke in a jilted voice. “Iden…cation please. Stand in … circle ….”
A glowing circle appeared in front of the door.
“Odd, this still has power. There must be a secondary set of fusion generators for the bunker,” Celes said. “Perhaps the same thing supplying the water.”
“The collapsed ceiling must have cut off the rest,” Janus noted. “Maybe we can open these doors, there’s bound to be something valuable behind them.” Janus felt a curious excitement begin to take hold of him, like those times so long ago, scrounging in the slums.
“Or something extremely dangerous,” Wouris said simply. “Either way, we should find out. Let’s take a look at this ID panel. We might be able to get around the security system.”
Celes nodded, and pulled some small tools from her suit, carefully examining the glowing panel. Wouris joined her, and together they probed the hole in the device for a solution to the shut door.
Meanwhile, Janus took a closer look at door itself, in case Wouris and Celes were unable to open it with finesse.
He quickly ruled out forcing the door open. The doors were far too solid to be wrenched open with muscle, and an explosion in the already small and weakened room was out of the question. He wasn’t even sure it would have worked anyway. Celes and Wouris’ voices were a whisper, “What if we cut the wiring here and…”
Janus moved forward to examine the edges of the doors for a weakness and stepped into the illuminated circle on the floor. As he did, a strange device descended from the space above him. It looked like a disembodied eye on a mechanical stalk and bathed him in a soft green light, circling him slowly. The panel spoke in its broken voice. “Scan… in prog...ess. Stand by…” Celes and Wouris both turned to watch.
After a few moments, it spoke again. “Scan comp… Welcome Executor.” The sound of heavy locks disengaging could be heard behind the door, and then it swept open, blasting Janus with a rush of air. Beyond the door lay total darkness, the noticeable thrum of machinery echoing in the distance.
Janus laughed, “Well, that was easy.”
Celes stood up, looking confused. “What did you do?”
He shrugged, “I asked it politely to open for me.”
Wouris looked sheepish, “Huh, I guess it would have made sense to just test whether the ID machine still worked or not, first. It’s obviously been damaged and doesn’t recognize people with access anymore.”
“What, don’t you think I’m Executor material?” Janus asked boldly.
Celes gave him a shove, “Yeah, we’ll all just bow down to your superiority.”
She stepped into the circle with him, and the strange eye-stalk scanned her as well. “Err…or… No matching sequence…fou-nd. Nota-tion made…”
Celes looked at the scanner. “Odd. I wonder if—“
BRAAAWWWWWRRR.
A huge, strange roar emanated from the hall; distant, but imposing. Glowing blue lines appeared on the floor ahead of them, guiding them forward.
“Enough,” Wouris said emphatically, “Let’s check it out before something else happens.”
Chapter 30: The Hive
The three moved as silently as ghosts, the faint sounds of machinery floating down the hall. The floor sloped downwards, leading them deeper underground. Another thick door with the Phoenix emblem stood at the end, its panel glowing green. It was unlocked. The sounds of a factory could be heard much more clearly now, and as the second door slid slowly open, the noise became deafening. A blast of heat swept across Janus, and he gaped in amazement, stepping slowly onto a balcony overlooking a huge, automated factory. Innumerable conveyors and cranes carried hundreds, even thousands of Security Trooper suits and weapons. Great presses molded new Infernus suits, while others were hardened and cleaned in giant vats of chemicals. Every few moments, a new suit would rush by, disappearing in the mass of machinery and metal that seemed to stretch indefinitely in all directions.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Wouris said, flabbergasted.
“Do you think that this has been running all this time, under the ruins of Phoenix?” Celes asked in awe.
“Let’s find out.”
Janus cocked his head for them to follow as he descended a set of stairs to their right. Wide catwalks stretched across the factory floor, which seemed to be a mass of gears and molten metal, following the trail of conveyors and cranes to where the Infernus suits disappeared.
The factory was immense, and Janus did his best to soak it all in, pausing to watch as myriad daeduluses with heavy, metal arms screwed prefabricated jump jets in the feet and back of each Infernus. One conveyor had a line of Zeus rifles slowly filing along it, all disappearing through a dark hole in the wall of the factory. Unable to hear each other over the din, the three used hand signals to communicate, and Janus directed them to another heavy door on the opposite side of the factory.
BRAAAWWWWWRRR.
The three froze at the screeching and clanking of metal – an unfinished suit was lodged in the assembly line. Cranes and belts ground to a halt, and a warning buzzer sounded somewhere in the distance. But after a few tense moments, they realized that no one was coming and opened the heavy door with a quick button press.
Soft blue lighting illuminated them as they stepped inside. It was noticeably cooler and quieter. It was a small control room, with dozens of screens monitoring the factory floor: displaying temperatures, parameter controls, errors, and automatic repairs that were underway. A huge red warning screen highlighted the area of the Infernus line that was experiencing the problem.
“Look at this,” Celes said. She pointed to another screen, on the opposite side of the room, by another door with the marking “Storage,” on the floor below it. “There are factories all around the outside edge of the facility, and initial production started on 547-1-15… That’s over 50 years ago. It was paused on…578-03-23, and resumed 586-03-23”
Wouris glanced at another screen, “And if this production quota of 1500 Zeus rifles a day is accurate, that’s…” she did a quick calculation in her head, “…nearly 25 million Zeuses alone.”
The three looked at the second door simultaneously.
Janus opened the door hesitantly. For a moment, there was nothing but a wall of darkness beyond, and then huge lamps far above them glowed faintly, slowly illuminating the jaw-dropping sight. A vast sea of weapons and suits were stacked in rows hundreds high all within a gigantic underground warehouse. Massive columns of scouts and fighters were lined up vertically in rows. Janus peered over a rail, the room was impossibly tall.
“Incredible,” Wouris gasped, “There is enough armor and weapons here to supply the world’s largest army. An army this big might have a shot at taking on all the other Corporations.”
“Too bad it’s all useless without the actual army to go with it.” Celes noted.
Wouris walked to a hanging fighter. They were simple affairs, with one large engine in the back, a tiny cockpit, and its two wings swept forward. The only noticeable marking was a single Phoenix emblem on the right side of the vehicle. “These are Siren class fighters. I haven’t seen one of these in years. They are highly effective against other fighter craft. Carry a lot of ordinance and have good speed, but they have almost no armor. They disappeared when Phoenix fell because no other corporation could afford to produce so many throwaway fighters.”
“Throwaway? What kind of general allows so many valuable fighters and pilots to be sacrificed?” Janus asked.
“The Phoenix Executors did. Phoenix was the largest, after all.”
Celes whistled, “It is amazing that they lost.”
“Not necessarily. Sometimes you aren’t as strong as you think you are,” Wouris trailed off, glancing towards Janus.
“Come on, let’s finish looking around this place,” Celes encouraged.
They followed the catwalks to another production floor, this one feeding the storage room with Sirens. This factory was cooler than the first; it just assembled the final components. Passing the Sirens as they were built, Janus could see what Wouris meant by throwaway. They were essentially engines with wings, designed for maximum payload with a minimum of anything else.
But nothing was more surprising to Janus than the very size of the underground facility. Through the haze of cranes, assembly lines and metal, he could see the factory stretched further and further; it was designed to equip a massive army. He commented on this to Wouris, “Celes raised a good point earlier. What is the purpose of these weapons without an army to use it?”
“But Janus,” Celes interrupted, “Phoenix was destroyed; perhaps there was an army to use it before.”
“So how is the factory still running? What is supplying its furnaces with materials? Could Phoenix really have fielded such a huge army?”
Wouris shook her head, “I don’t know. They may have had the citizens to fight, but every soldier you have in the field is one less working the fields. The Corporations already have large standing armies compared to their populations. I don’t think even Phoenix had the capability to pull more of it citizens as soldiers. Besides, the other Corporations would quickly realize what was happening,” she swept a hand around at the factory, “The Corporations may not be able to see the production, but they would see the end results. I don’t think Phoenix would be able to produce an army fast enough to use all this.”
“So,” Celes asked Janus’ unspoken question, “What was the point?”
Chapter 31: The White-Haired Man
The factory finally seemed to come to an end when they reached another heavy door marked “Cold Storage”. Beyond the door lay another long passage, sloping downwards, ever deeper into the facility. The air grew cooler until they finally reached a thick, heavily insulated door, again marked “Cold Storage”. Janus prepped himself for a blast of cold air and opened the door. A chill, misty wave washed over him, but not the one he expected. The space beyond had totally collapsed. A huge Phoenix building had sunk deep into the ground and filled the area, its many floors creating layers of rock and dirt. The cold mist that filled Phoenix seemed to be generated from the depths of Phoenix itself, rising up from the collapsed column to fill the ruins. It was difficult to see in the thick fog, but only the outside ring of catwalks seemed to have survived, the rest of the massive space was crushed beneath the Phoenix superscraper. The inside edge of the ring had been shorn off by the collapse, and the catwalk protested as Janus carefully placed his weight upon it.
The three ran their flashlights over the wall of earth before them, the light granting the fog a ghostly quality. Faint gleams along the surface caught Celes’ eye, and Wouris crouched at the edge where the building slid into the cavern, disbelief upon her face.
“Immutium! The area’s laden with it. It’s a literal treasure trove,” she breathed, her voice elated. “It must have just filled this cavern before! It isn’t a natural substance though, so I wonder what Phoenix was using it for?” She scooped a handful of Immutium and dirt and put in one of her waist pockets. “Maybe Chiles or Graham can give us an idea if we take a sample back.”
Janus nodded, “Well, when we get back to Valhalla, maybe we can send some forces to collect…” He froze, voices were echoing from the mist in front of him. He flicked his palm in an exaggerated movement so that Celes and Wouris could see. Peering over a rail to his left, he could just make out the shapes of two S.T.s below them, walking along a bridge beneath their platform. Janus strained to hear them.
“Don’t know why we’re here…”
“Orders are orders: we just do what we’re told. Who knows what the HAMs want with this place?”
Janus silently flipped over the rail, hanging by his legs to get a closer look at the soldiers.
The first grunted, “Yeah. High and mighty Executors can order us wherever – but I hate repair jobs. These factories just won’t keep running, and I hate being sent out to the edges. It takes forever to get out here with all the collapsed passages.”
“Just be glad we were out this far already. This is the short leg,” the second one interjected.
Janus squinted at the pair of S.T.s through the fog. It was almost impossible to d
iscern anything about the suits, but just before the pair disappeared completely into the mist, an emblem glinted in the light of the other’s headlamps.
Using his legs to flip himself back over the rail, he signaled to Celes and Wouris, giving them the all clear. “Cerberus!” Janus whispered excitedly.
“Well, I guess we’re not the first ones to find this place…” Celes whispered back.
“Right, let’s see if we can find out what they want,” Wouris said.
“We should stick to hand signals now. There’s no telling how many Cerberus soldiers are here, and I doubt they would be happy to see us if they found us.” Celes whispered.
Janus and Wouris agreed. They moved invisibly and swiftly along the dark catwalk. It would take an exceptionally skilled, and very lucky, S.T. to realize anything lurked in the shadows.
Narrow passages and twisted metal, often forced Janus, Celes, and Wouris to crawl and climb to move forward. Beyond the catwalks, they found more doors, leading in all directions. Janus opted for the one that descended deeper still, leaving the heavy mist and darkness for strange labs, or what was left of them: Broken consoles, smashed machines with strange dials and tubes, and oozing vats filled with strange blue goo.
Electrogel. Janus signed.
Wouris signaled the pair with her hands. (These) labs (look like they were) destroyed (from the) inside.
Celes signaled with one hand in response. Bomb.
Wouris nodded.
Janus noted the damage only got worse as they moved deeper. Some rooms were nothing more than blackened glass and twisted metal. Whomever had destroyed the labs had known what they were doing and were thorough.
And then they heard more voices – faint, but getting stronger. Soon, they caught glimpses of men and women within some of the broken rooms. And not all were armored S.T.s. A few worked to salvage equipment from those labs that had received the least damage. Others directed S.T.s to carry huge crates to and from some central location.
The Phoenix Fallacy Book I: Janus Page 19