Once on the other side, they found themselves standing on a rickety metal lift platform, suspended over a vast chasm of nothingness. Farah walked over to the lift controls and triggered the lift to descend. It jerked into motion, dropping slowly with the tat-tat-tat of old chains unwinding from a motorized winch. Simultaneously, the doors began grinding shut, sealing them into the mine.
They spent long minutes descending past sheer rock walls slick and glistening with moisture in the light of their glow lamps. Finally, the lift jerked to a stop in front of a tram station with a waiting rail car.
They walked out into the middle of the platform and waited there. The station had a few working glow lamps, but the rail car and the tracks were dark and silent. A few more minutes passed, which Bretton spent studying the cottony puffs of condensing moisture streaming from his nose and lips. He and Farah were both wearing thick jackets emblazoned with the Gencore logo, courtesy of the Resistance, but the cold crept in despite their layers. The Null Zone was cold, cut off as it was from natural sunlight, but at least it retained the heat produced by indoor heating, air cars, and power plants. Much worse were the abandoned Underlevels and the subterranean labyrinths of abandoned mines. There, the only heating came from Avilon’s molten core, and that was still a long way down.
“How long are they going to make us wait?” Farah asked, glancing around nervously.
Bretton turned to her with a shrug and set Donali down once more. He turned off the grav gun and joined Farah in looking around. The station was damp and cold. The air smelled of dirt and wet rocks, with a vaguely ferrous tang. “I guess that’s up to them,” he replied. While he waited, he brought to mind the code phrase the Resistance would be looking for when they came. Someone would ask them what they were doing in an abandoned mine, and Bretton’s answer would be, We’re investigating a dymium gas leak.
The use of code phrases wasn’t particularly secure, but any extra layers of security could only help. The Resistance’s main defense was that once you got to know where their headquarters were, you could never leave. Everyone else was brought in and out whilst heavily sedated. It was more or less the same principle that Omnius had used to keep Avilon hidden for countless centuries.
Bretton turned to his niece and saw her hugging herself and shivering. She was much skinnier than him, and the cold had obviously begun to affect her core temperature. “Cold?”
“As krak on ice.”
“Colorful.”
“Not really. Turns white.”
“I don’t want to look inside your freezer.”
Farah barked a short laugh that echoed off the walls of the mine. They passed several more minutes in silence, broken only by the sound of Farah’s chattering teeth and the distant sound of water splashing on rocks from some subterranean river. Then, finally, another noise reached their ears—
“Hello strangers,” it said, slicing through the gloom.
They turned toward the noise. The familiar blue-white glow of shielded armor, made fuzzy by the low light and the humid air, was strange to see in the Null Zone—but far stranger were the speaker’s glowing amber eyes—ARCs. Then the man stepped out of the shadows, and they saw him for what he was—
A Peacekeeper.
* * *
Ethan was shocked. Far below, he saw a vast field of garbage. The air was saturated with a rancid stench that made him want to gag. He buried his nose in his robes in a vain attempt to get away from it.
Giant, glowing blue accelerator tubes snaked down from a high, dark ceiling overhead. Ethan’s vantage point was a rooftop at least a hundred meters above the ground, and the ends of the accelerator tubes were at eye level with him, spewing a continuous stream of multi-colored refuse. Far below, circling at a cautious distance from the falling streams of garbage, Ethan saw the floodlights of giant, mobile trash compacters as they rolled over the top of the garbage piles, packing them down. Mechanized load lifters used saw-bladed arms to cut and carry cubes of recently packed trash to glowing red pits in the ground. Ethan assumed those pits led to some type of recycling plant where the trash would be processed further. A planet with as many citizens as Avilon couldn’t afford to waste any of its resources.
But the vast field of trash wasn’t what had shocked him. It was the horde of humanity crawling around the machines and climbing the mountains of trash like spiders. Ethan focused on the nearest group, trying to get a better look. His ARCs responded to that desire by magnifying what he was seeing, and he gasped. These people were wearing torn and patched clothing—dirty fragments of cloth at best. They were crawling over the trash on all fours like animals, picking some things up and tossing them aside, while other bits of garbage they lifted to their mouths and tore into greedily.
They were hungry, hunting through the refuse for food like rats. Ethan shook his head, horrified. Dark Space had been bad, and the people there had been hungry, but they’d never been hungry enough to resort to eating garbage. His stomach did a nauseated flip, and he felt his gorge rising again.
Frozen in shock and horror, Ethan stared for a long time, watching these rag people enjoy their buffet. As some left with their hunger sated, others came, seeming to melt out of the shadows.
There was no end to them.
Ethan blinked, and then blinked again. He shook his head and looked away. As he did so, his ARCs returned to a normal zoom, and he began to notice his more immediate surroundings. To one side of the rooftop he saw a lift tube, flanked by a pair of drones. Curious, Ethan walked up to them.
“Mind if I use the lift?” he asked.
The red optics in the center of each ball-shaped head tracked him, but neither of the drones replied.
Nevertheless, the doors of the lift swished open. Again, Ethan turned to look behind him, convinced that someone was following him and secretly opening doors for him as he went.
But there was no one there.
Ethan stepped into the lift, walking up to the far side. It was transparent and gave him another look at the starving hordes swarming over the trash mountains below. He heard the doors swish shut, and the lift started downward of its own accord, dropping swiftly toward the trash collection level.
Omnius was definitely behind this little tour.
As the lift drew near to the ground, Ethan got a sense of scale. The load lifters were as big as any mech Ethan had ever seen, while the mobile trash compactors were the size of miniature skyscrapers, bright with running lights, their treads grinding along the shallow slopes of falling trash.
Then the lift dropped below the collection level and his view changed to that of another wide-open space, this one a vast, brightly-lit warehouse with clean white walls and matte gray floors.
Racks of revolving conveyor belts ran down from the ceiling. The aisles between those racks were crowded with orderly lines of people. These people at least wore decent clothes, but they were all drab browns and grays. They pushed hover carts ahead of them while they picked small, cubic packages off the conveyor belts and placed them in their carts.
Ethan realized he was looking at some type of supermarket. The lift stopped and the doors opened behind him. He turned and walked out, bracing himself for another noxious wave of rotting garbage to invade his nostrils. Instead, he found the air sterile and slightly fragrant.
That raised his spirits. He walked from the lift to the nearest line of shoppers. They watched him carefully as he approached, momentarily distracted. As he drew near, he noticed that the looks he was getting weren’t simply curious; they were either fearful or hostile. A little girl pointed to him and said, “Look, Mommy! It’s a Non!”
Ethan stopped and gave the girl a curious smile. “What did you call me?”
She shrank away, hiding behind her mother’s legs. The mother’s reaction was similar. She went back to her shopping.
Worried he’d somehow offended them, Ethan stepped up to the woman and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. “I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said.
The woman turned to him with wide eyes and shook her head. “What do you want from me, My Lord?”
At that, Ethan noticed a few others turn to look at him. A pair of white teenage males caught Ethan’s eye. Their faces were pale and dirty, their hair greasy and disheveled, and their eyebrows were mysteriously missing. They didn’t look frightened—they looked angry. Their eyes were dark and soulless.
“I’m not your lord,” Ethan replied, ignoring the two ruffians who’d glanced his way. “I seem to have come here by mistake . . . could you tell me where I am?”
“You’re on Sub Level 40 . . . in the Grunge.”
“The what?”
“Sutterfold District, Master.”
“I’m not your master, either.”
The woman shook her head, and for the first time her watery blue eyes seemed to really see him. The fear shining there retreated a few steps, and she seemed to relax. “You’re wearing one of their robes, but you’re too old to be one of them.”
“One of who?”
“A Non!” the little girl he’d seen earlier popped out to inform him.
“Hey, what’s the hold up?” someone shouted. Ethan noticed then that the woman he’d stopped to talk to wasn’t moving, but the conveyor belts were rolling on. Up ahead there was a growing gap between her and the rest of the line.
“Excuse me, I have to get back to shopping,” she said.
“Sure, I’ll walk with you.”
“If you’re not a Non, what are you?” the little girl asked, departing from the safety of her mother’s legs to walk beside him.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s what we call people from the Uppers,” the girl’s mother replied. “Nons. It’s short for non-human. You’re wearing white, like a Celestial, but you’re too old to be one of them. And if you were one of us, you’d know what a Non is.”
Ethan’s lips quirked up in a wry smile. “I suppose I would. Actually . . . I’m a refugee from the Imperium. The Nons are making me go through something they call The Choosing.”
The woman met that admission with wide and blinking eyes. “What are you doing here, then?”
“I don’t know yet. I came here by accident.”
“If you came from the Uppers, nothing that happens to you is an accident.”
“So I’ve been told,” Ethan replied dryly.
“You’ve been to other worlds,” the woman said.
“Yes, dozens . . . hundreds actually, but that was before the war.”
“You’re very lucky. I can only imagine what that must be like . . .”
Ethan heard the longing in the woman’s voice, and he felt a pang of sympathy for her and her daughter. “I bet you’d like to get away from Avilon and go start a colony someplace else.”
“Omnius would never allow that.”
“Right, Omnius. He’s a real pain in the you-know-what, isn’t he?”
“He is what he is.”
Ethan watched the woman reach out to take a bright green cube from the conveyor belt running beside her. It was wrapped in some type of transparent packing material. “What’s that?”
“Enriched cellulose.”
“Plants?” Ethan eyed the green cube. “Looks processed.”
“That’s because it’s recycled.”
“From what?” A suspicion formed in Ethan’s gut, and his insides churned.
“Garbage,” the woman said, confirming his suspicions.
“And you eat it?”
“Down here we don’t have a choice. If we had the money to buy fresh food we wouldn’t be here. This food is free,” the woman said, reaching out to take a bloody red cube from the conveyor belt.
Ethan wondered if it might be recycled meat. Suddenly he remembered the hordes of people he’d seen crawling over the mountains of unprocessed garbage. “I saw something . . . people, lots of people, looking through the garbage before it gets recycled. They seemed to be looking for food. If all of this food is free, why would anyone try to eat raw garbage?”
“Because they’re Psychos. If we allowed them in here, they’d sooner kill everyone than thank us.”
“Psychos?”
“You really are from someplace else,” the woman said. “They’re Bliss addicts who’ve gone too long without a dose. The withdrawal symptoms destroy your brain and turn you into an animal. That’s why we call them Pyschos, because they’re all crazy.”
“Sounds a lot worse than the drugs we had in the Imperium.”
The woman nodded and they walked on in silence. They turned a corner and came to a conveyor belt laden with rolls of fabric and stacks of cylindrical containers, each of them a different color from the next. As he wondered what they were, glowing text appeared above them, revealing their contents. Some were filled with toothpaste, others with moisturizing creams, soap, cleaning solvents, paint, and more.
“This is all made from trash?”
The woman nodded, but said nothing.
“Amazing.”
She sent him a hesitant smile and looked away quickly. Noticing that the fear in her eyes was back, he wondered what he’d done wrong. “I’m making you uncomfortable,” he said. “I should go.”
“It’s not you . . . but you should go.”
“Not me?”
She stopped walking and looked at him very seriously. “You’re wearing Celestial Whites and your eyes are glowing with ARCs. Down here a pair of those are worth more than most people make in a month—and that’s if they have a job.”
Ethan turned in a slow circle. He found the pair of ruffians he’d spotted earlier glancing at him again. They were standing a few feet closer to him than they had been before. When they saw him staring back, they looked away and whispered something between them.
Ethan’s eyes narrowed, and he walked up to them. “Hey,” he said.
One of the boys was tall and skinny. The other shorter, but barrel-chested under his dark gray robes. Ethan decided that Barrel Chest was the one to talk to. “You two have a problem with me?” he asked, stopping to stand uncomfortably close to the young man.
Barrel Chest looked up and smiled with a mouth full of missing teeth. “You’re a long way from home, old man.”
“And?”
The boy shrugged. “And nothin’ just don’t stay long, that’s all.”
“So what if I do? What are you going to do about it?” Ethan gave the boy a shove. He bounced into the man behind him, who quickly shrank away. Barrel Chest recovered quickly, and shot Ethan another hateful look.
Ethan replied with a nasty grin. “There, see, that’s the look you were giving me earlier. You should mind your own business before you lose any more teeth.”
Barrel Chest took a swing. Ethan ducked and came in with a right cross. The boy took it in the ear and stumbled to one side. He cursed and looked up, his dark eyes flashing.
By now people were giving them a wide berth, clearing a space. Some had stopped to watch, while others were moving on more quickly than before.
The boy let out a roar and charged. Ethan blocked two blows headed for his face on his forearms and took a quick step forward to grab the kid’s head in both hands and force it down. Simultaneously he brought his knee up. Barrel Chest’s nose crunched and he screamed. The boy crumpled to the ground, his nose streaming blood.
“Anyone else?” Ethan asked, turning in a quick circle to look for new challengers. No one would meet his gaze. He affected a smug grin to mask the revulsion he felt at the beating he’d given.
“Put your hands behind your back,” a soft voice said.
Then came a girlish scream, and Ethan heard the voice of the woman he’d been talking with before. Another scream, and the mother’s voice became more urgent. “Leave her alone!”
Ethan turned toward the commotion and saw the tall, skinny boy had the little girl in a choke hold. He’d pressed a long, thin knife to her throat.
“I said, put your hands behind your back,” Skinny repeated, nodding
to him.
Ethan’s eyebrows floated up. He noted that the rest of the people in the line were all conveniently minding their own business—except for the girl’s mother, who was still pleading with the knife wielder to let her daughter go.
“What do you want?” Ethan asked, wondering where the facility’s security guards were.
“Your clothes. Your ARCs, and all the bytes in your account.”
“Bytes?” Ethan wondered aloud. “I don’t have any money.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Ethan noticed a glowing white tattoo on the boy’s upper arm. It was a skull. “You think you’re tough, don’t you, boy?”
The kid sneered at him. “Hurry up! I don’t have all day.”
Peripherally, Ethan became aware of Barrel Chest getting up beside him. “If you’re so tough, why don’t you let the girl go and fight me? Keep your blade, I don’t mind a challenge.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Afraid I’ll break your nose, too?”
Skinny inched his knife closer to the little girl’s throat. A small bead of blood appeared at the tip. The little girl whimpered, and her mother screamed, sinking to her knees and breaking down in tears.
“Hey!” Ethan said, taking half a step forward. His ire was building swiftly now. “What’s wrong with you? She’s just a kid!”
“So? I used to be one, too,” Skinny said. “Hands behind your back.”
Ethan did as he was told. He received a swift kick behind his knees and sunk to the ground. A second kick hit him in the side of the head. His ear exploded in pain, and he heard a ringing sound. The world began to sway around him, and his vision darkened around the edges.
Skinny let go of the girl and began advancing on him with the knife. “I’m gonna carve you up,” he said.
Ethan freed his hands from their self-imposed bondage. Then Barrel Chest appeared in front of him, his face and nose a horror of smeared and dripping blood. Ethan saw the boot coming toward his own nose just in time to catch it in his hands. The boot was slick with the boy’s blood and it slipped through Ethan’s grasp, hitting him above one eye. His head exploded with pain again, and he felt a wave of nausea wash over him.
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