Текст книги "Hastrom City Rising (The Adventures of Letho Ferron Book 2)"

Автор книги: Doug Rickaway

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“Mendraga,” Bayorn hissed, sniffing the air, his massive nostrils flaring with each giant intake of air.

“Take it easy, old friend. They haven’t even noticed we’re here yet,” Letho said.

A large number of people milled about within the walls in what appeared to be an open air market. They hadn’t seen anyone on their way into the city, but now that they were closer, they saw numerous people exiting through the gate and heading off in all directions. Just as Saul said, they were all wearing very similar robes to the one that Letho was wearing.

“Scavengers,” Deacon said. “Those are the guy we’re pretending to be, right?”

“Why don’t you just go over there and tell those guards who we are,” Letho hissed under his breath.

“Sorry!” Deacon whispered out of the side of his mouth. “I’m just nervous. Cut me some slack!”

“Will you two stop arguing? We need to figure a way in!” Saul hissed.

One of the sentries patrolling the top of the wall appeared to have noticed Letho and company. They were, after all, the only ones with an eight-foot-tall Tarsi. The sentry stopped and spoke into his uCom. One of the sentries on the ground level answered him via uCom, then motioned for the four of them to come to him.

“All right, here we go,” Letho said.

As they strode over to the guard, Letho tried to adopt a slouching lope, his shoulders sagging, head hanging under his heavy hood. But he felt foolish, not at all like the scrubby scavenger he was attempting to portray. Finally he gave up,and took on his usual gait as they closed the distance between themselves and the beckoning guard.

ELEVEN – Bazaar

“State your business here,” the Mendraga guard said, eyeing Bayorn with a look of contempt upon his face. Letho found it amusing. This person who had become part of Alastor’s fold, accepting his gift of eternal life, had probably never had a negative thought about a Tarsi during his time on the Fulcrum station, yet now he regarded the Tarsi as a mortal enemy, and he didn’t even try to hide his disdain.

“We caught this feller trying to escape. We’re returning him in hopes of a reward,” Letho said. The sentry laughed at this.

“You’ll get a reward all right. A pat on the back and a kick in the ass.” He turned to the sentry on the other side of the gate. “You, over there! Take these two down to the Tarsi camp and get this one back where he belongs.”

“Why do I have to do it? I took the last one,” the other sentry whined.

The first sentry, who seemed to have zero patience for these shenanigans, and most likely most all shenanigans in general, took two menacing steps forward. The second guard backed down before his superior officer could take another.

“All right, all right, fine. Let’s go.” He moved to gather up the cords that held Bayorn, who roared and threw his arm up and away. For a moment Letho feared that Bayorn was going to bring both fists down on the Mendraga’s head, crushing it like an overripe melon. It was all coming apart. For some foolish reason Letho had thought they might just let them go on to the Tarsi encampment without a guarded escort.

But Bayorn played his part. He dropped his arms to his side and bowed his head, casting a glance at Letho.

What do we do? the look appeared to say.

Letho shrugged and tried to compress just go with it, we’ll figure it out later into a facial expression. Bayorn glared at Letho, and the look told Letho that his lack of faith remained. But Letho didn’t know what else to do. Start a fight with armed Mendraga right in front of the gate, with bad guy backup most likely a uCom call away? And who was Bayorn to judge his decision anyway? This mission was his own, by Je-Ha, and he wasn’t about to back down when he was so close to seeing Hastrom City with his own eyes, seeing what Abraxas really had in place.

“You!” the whiny Mendraga pointed at Letho. “What are you doing talking to this stupid Tarsi? He a friend of yours?” The Mendraga eyed Letho with suspicion. His hand dropped to his rifle, and Letho thought about making a move to grab the weapon. It would have been so easy—the Mendraga wouldn’t know what hit him. But then he looked at Deacon and Saul, and even Bayorn. He couldn’t guarantee their safety, and he didn’t have Saladin to feed him battle scenarios and statistics.

“Hey, take it easy. I just got to know him a little on the trek in. He’s not a bad guy, you know. Besides the fact that he’s a dirty slave bear, of course,” Letho finished.

The Mendraga spat at Letho’s feet and scoffed. “Dirty slave bear lover,” he said. “You make me sick.” Then he turned his attention to Saul. “You, the man of few words. You come with me. I ain’t taking this big bastard down there myself.”

Saul looked at Letho, who nodded assent. “Sure,” Saul said. “No problem.”

“You other two, you’re free to go, just don’t cause any trouble. We don’t have no patience for dumbass colonists coming into our fair city wrecking things.”

“You don’t have to worry about us,” Letho said. “We’re just going in to look for some power converters,” Letho said.

“Off you go, then.”

Saul and the Mendraga guard left on their mission to return Bayorn to the Tarsi camp that he had “escaped from.” Of course, that escape had been much more elaborate than the Mendraga guard realized—involving an incursion into the enemies’ own ship and through a time-bending vortex. Letho queued up his uCom and tapped out a text message to Saul:

Don’t panic. Meet up out front of Abraxas’s temple.

“So now what, old friend?” Deacon asked. “Shall we go do a little sight-seeing?”

“Yes. Let’s.”

****

Neon, holoscreens, and intrusive audio blurbs assaulted Letho and Deacon as they headed into the heart of the only known, still-functioning city on the entire planet. The screens and decorations had been grafted onto buildings that had been eroded over time, slowly whittled away by the razor grains blasted upon them by sandstorm after sandstorm. That is, until Abraxas and his army had raised the protective walls around the heart of the city. This was done, Letho imagined, not only to keep the sand out, but also to keep the others—the ones with the extra limbs, razor claws, and seemingly no regard for the Eursan race—at bay. Having had a front row seat at a news production outfit in his former life on the Fulcrum station, Letho was no stranger to the way that those in power occasionally tweaked news reports to assuage or terrify their viewers, depending entirely on what their motives were. He wondered how much the people inside the wall knew about the mutant threat that lurked outside their walls even now. He also wondered whether, when the proverbial waste hit the fan, the walls would be able to repel the hordes.

The people they passed wore very similar clothes to those that one might see on a Fulcrum station, meaning that most of them were wearing their Fulcrum jumpsuits, which by now had become worn and threadbare. Many had added ornamentation, like plated shoulder guards, headgear, bracelets, and anklets. Most had presumably been cobbled together from scavenged scrap, taken from the ghostly sentinel skyscrapers that stood outside of Abraxas’s little circle of light. The center of the city was like an overgrown campfire in the midst of chaos, pushing back the shadows so that the citizens could live with a relative level of peace.

And then there were the Mendraga citizens, who seemed to float above the rest, though their feet never actually left the ground. Their adornments were more sophisticated and complex, many of them wearing headdresses that extended a full foot or more above their heads. Their bodies were covered in form-fitting material that puffed out in places, augmenting musculature that simply wasn’t there, for the Mendraga condition didn’t always lend itself to robust physique. Letho and Deacon made sure to give them all a wide berth, so as to avoid detection. Letho had no idea what their scent capabilities were, so he certainly erred to the side of caution in that regard.

Many of the buildings that had once been enclosed retail stores had since been converted to open storefronts, with carts offering wares such as broiled rodent on a stick, offered on plate with a side order of dry tubers of various lengths and girths. Thankfully Letho’s belly was full from his lunch under the overpass earlier that afternoon, and he had no desire to fill his stomach with unknown low-dwelling creatures prepared by vendors whose hygiene could be best described as questionable.

They continued down the main thoroughfare, assaulted by full-length holoscreens urging them to purchase all number of items in order to enhance their stay while at Hastrom City, and warning them that their enjoyment of their time may in fact hinge entirely upon said purchases. Letho didn’t feel particularly inclined to hire someone to do facial reconstruction to make his face look more chic, nor did he feel the need to buy boots that changed color to match his mood or his ensemble. Letho preferred functional clothing: lots of pockets to stow things, and enough room to run, jump, and squat. The trappings of a man of adventure. Color or style was of little to no concern to him.

Letho became gradually aware of the fact that no one was using their uComs, which struck him as very odd. As he looked closer at a passerby, he noticed a ragged scar across the man’s forearm. He surreptitiously examined a few other people. They, too, had the same scars.

“Hey, Deacon. We probably shouldn’t use our uComs unless we absolutely have to.”

“Why? You used yours before!” Deacon said.

Letho gestured toward a young man as he passed, and Deacon’s eyes rose when he saw the ugly scar on his arm. It looked like an unqualified person had performed the extraction with a most imprecise implement.

They kept walking, with Letho occasionally needing to pull Deacon, who frequently became distracted by the sights and sounds all around them. It was impressive what Abraxas and Alastor had done. There was no trash on the streets, and the buildings inside the central wall had been refaced and reconstructed. There was no sign of decay anywhere to be found.

Letho watched with keen interest as a woman purchased some food from a street vendor. There seemed to be no monetary transaction. Back on the Fulcrum station, a uCom scan would have been necessary to purchase food, but it seemed that here, the woman didn’t have to pay for her food at all. She just walked away from the counter, tearing barbecued flesh from a large white bone.

“Man, that smells really good, doesn’t it?” Deacon said.

“Yeah, it does. But what kind of meat is that? Look at that bone.”

“Well, if Saul and Zedock figured out how to raise pigs and such, maybe the good people of Hastrom City figured out how to do it too,” Deacon said. “Ooooh, maybe they found some cows! Do you think they have beef? I’ve always wanted to try a real hamburger!”

“Stick to the plan, Deacon,” Letho said.

“Right. Sorry, just got a little excited. So what is the plan exactly?”

“Plan?” Letho asked, grinning. it was the first smile that had graced his face in some time that wasn’t disingenuous—despite the grim circumstances and the fact that they might be discovered by the enemy at any moment. He shuddered to think of the consequences should they be discovered for who they truly were.

“There isn’t a plan, really. I just really wanted to see Hastrom City. Does that make me a bad person?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Deacon. “I’m just as curious as you. By all means, lead on.”

They continued forward past vendors hawking freshly seared meat, clothing, and jewelry. After some time they came upon a group of Eursans staring vapidly at a large holoscreen built into the wall of what appeared to have once been an apothecary of some sort. The people were quite an assortment, ranging from svelte Eursans of clear high standing to the swarthy race that Saul had called the hammerheads. Letho and Deacon joined the crowd of onlookers, eager to see what so many people had gathered to watch.

It appeared to be some sort of fam-sit, represented in photo-3D. The crowd watched with rapt attention as the reluctant father interacted with his disgruntled son. Something was off in the way the characters’ bodies moved, though; the motion was too smooth. Their doll eyes stared at one another devoid of any emotion, and their facial expressions didn’t quite match the dramatic content of the episode.

“Wait a sec—I know these actors. I saw them in a fam-sit once. The only problem is that it was pre-exodus. How could they possibly still be alive?” Letho wondered aloud.

“Maybe it’s a rerun?”

“I don’t think so; the resolution is super-high, and the clothing they’re wearing is very similar to what the people are wearing all around us.”

“It’s just a fam-sit, Letho,” Deacon said.

The show went to a commercial break and another perfect digital person appeared. “This episode of Father Loves Son has been brought to you by the Corpus Verum, bringing you quality entertainment from the actors you want to see, and keeping you up to date with the news you need to know.”

“Who is the Corpus Verum?” Letho asked.

“Don’t know. Some sort of media conglomerate, maybe?” Deacon said.

“Could be. Well, let’s keep going. See what else we can find,” Letho said.

****

As the two continued farther into the city, they reveled in the sights and sounds. Letho noticed that very few of the citizens were Mendraga. He figured that Abraxas was managing the population carefully, maintaining the balance between his Eursan cattle and his Mendraga warriors. To control the population, he would have to maintain some sort of optimal ratio between the humans and Mendraga, lest one outnumber the other and upset the balance. Could the standard rank-and-file Mendraga produce more Mendraga? Or were Abraxas and Alastor the only ones that could? Letho hadn’t ever gotten around to asking Thresha about any of that.

Thresha…

Letho’s heart became a frozen tumor in his chest—then was quickly replaced by a seething anger. What if she happened to walk down the street right now? Would he kill her? He was at quite a disadvantage without Saladin or his Black Bear, but a deep dark part of his psyche, a part that savored spilled blood and killing, thought that he could definitely kill Thresha should the need arise, and barehanded if need be.

He shuddered, willing such thoughts away. Where had they come from? He wondered if they were products of the strong emotion he felt for Thresha—or whether perhaps, deep down inside, he really was twisted, a creature that actually enjoyed the killing he had done since his adventure began.

For once, his copilot had nothing to say on the subject.

The sound of bells ringing filled the air with their sweet, hollow timbre. Both Letho and Deacon moved toward the sound, curious to discover its origin. To their surprise, a church stood just beyond the edge of the market. It was an old building that must have originally promoted the worship of one of Eursus’s forgotten deities It was all angles and arches, with spires surging upward into the sky like gothic antennas set up to improve the reception of heavenly broadcasts.

Atop a flight of stairs, just in front of the doors to the church, sat a large golden statue of a Mendraga warrior in a flowing cloak and some sort of ceremonial armor. In one hand was a mighty sword. In the other was an ornate sextant.

“A church? I thought most religions were abandoned after the collapse,” said Deacon.

“They were,” said Letho. “I suspect this is Abraxas’s church.” He turned to Deacon. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go pay our respects.”

****

Bayorn surveyed his surroundings, trying to mentally map as much of the terrain as possible while the Mendraga warrior led him and Saul to the Tarsi encampment. As they continued along their route they passed a set of squat square buildings arrayed in a grid. The grounds were well kept, and Bayorn had to suppress a gasp of amazement as he saw a growing green thing for the first time in his life. A small shrub, sparse and twisted, but alive just the same, had sprung up from the soil in a flowerbed near the square buildings.

“What are those buildings?” Saul asked.

The Mendraga guard looked at Saul with suspicion in his eyes.

“What do you mean, ‘What are those buildings’? That’s a commune.”

“Uh, yeah, of course,” Saul said, running a hand across his head. The very thin layer of hair that had sprouted up made a rasping sound as he did so. “I’m a colonist, see, and I haven’t been inside the walls in a while. When I left they were just setting up the living quarters for the folks from the Fulcrum stations. Never actually saw one completed. Looks nice though.”

The Mendraga eyed Saul a bit longer, then turned his eyes back toward the road. “Your slave bear is big. Never seen one that size. Must have been a bitch to subdue him.”

“It wasn’t too bad. They aren’t too smart, you know. Easy to trap. Plus if you’ve got a can of Valhalla Sausages they’ll run through broken glass to get to it,” Saul said.

Bayorn grunted, and the two turned back to him.

“Keep it down, slave, or I’ll take you behind one of those buildings and put you down myself. There’s plenty of your kind to take your place, you know.”

Bayorn bowed his head, and said nothing. How he wanted to reach out and tear the Mendraga’s head from his shoulders.

Suddenly searing pain flashed through Bayorn’s frontal lobe, and he staggered, raising his hands to his head, trying to press them to his temples.

“What’s wrong with him?” Bayorn heard the Mendraga ask, and then the reality in which he existed completely disappeared.

****

He was looking through the eyes of some other Tarsi. Perhaps it was an ancestor, for Bayorn felt a certain sameness in the way the other breathed, moved, in the pattern of his thoughts. Bayorn was privy to the Tarsi’s other senses, too: the smell of the air, the coolness of the laboratory. He tried to move, to speak, but to no avail. He was but an observer of the events that unfolded before him.

It was a Tarsi laboratory, nothing like the sterile boxes that the Eursans worked in. The walls of the room were round and made of some rich wood that seemed to glow from within. The computer panels before him were organic in nature too, a blend of artificial and natural. A Tarsi stood before him, measuring reagents and combining them in a complex array of flasks, tubes, burners, and other trappings of chemistry. Bayorn could feel the Tarsi he currently inhabited grow apprehensive.

“What you are doing is forbidden, Abraxas. You know this,” the Tarsi said.

Abraxas! How handsome he was. He wasn’t a large Tarsi, but his frame was solid and defined. A mane sprang up around his shoulders and head, framing eyes that were large and striking. His face ended in a shapely snout and an expressive mouth.

Abraxas laughed. “The fools on the Council know nothing. So consumed with their Seeder Vessels and their desire to create life on empty planets. What about those of us here? On this planet?”

“The use of Tarsi science to alter our own flesh is wrong.”

“Then why don’t you stop me, Sartruvus? If you are so concerned about the decrees of those old fools.”

“You are my brother, Abraxas. I beseech you, stop what you are doing. It is not too late to turn away from the path you have chosen.”

“But why would I? I have discovered the key to immortality, Sartruvus. No Tarsi ever need know death again.”

“We all must die some day, my brother. It is the way of things. Those who tamper with the great cycle suffer great consequences. Our forefathers discovered that long ago.”

Just then there was a knock at the door.

“Open up!” a voice shouted. Bayorn’s body—Sartruvus’s body—grew cold with fear as Abraxas turned to look at him, his face contorting with rage.

“You have betrayed me! My own brother!”

The door splintered behind them and several armed Tarsi guards rushed into the laboratory. One of them stepped forward and addressed Abraxas.

“Abraxas, you have been summoned to appear before the Council for violating scientific research protocols. You will come with us now, willingly, or by force, if necessary,” the guard said.

Abraxas did not even bother to respond. He merely took a knife from the table before him and plunged it deep into his forearm, drawing a ragged gash down the length of it. Golden blood began to spurt from the gory wound.

“What’s he doing?” one of the guards shouted.

“Abraxas! No!” Sartruvus shouted.

The guards began to move toward Abraxas, who was now reaching for a flask full of viscous black liquid. Before they could reach him, he had poured the liquid into the open wound, and it seemed to pull itself into Abraxas’s flesh, as if acting of its own volition.

Abraxas fell to the floor, convulsing, his body throbbing and contorting as if his inner organs were being violently reorganized. Sartruvus could see panic on his brother’s face.

“What is happening to me?” Abraxas screamed, his legs kicking as if he were trying to run away from the transformation that was now occurring inside his body.

And then he grew still. Sartruvus stepped forward, moving toward his brother’s twisted body.

“Please step away, Sartruvus,” the guard commanded. But Sartruvus did not obey. Bayorn felt all the love Sartruvus possessed for his brother welling within his chest, and he felt the briny wet heat of tears gushing from his eyes, clouding his vision.

Abraxas sprang up from the ground faster than a Tarsi should be able to. He opened his jaws wider than a Tarsi should be able to. And when Sartruvus saw the vile feeding appendage slithering forth from Abraxas’s mouth, he knew that his brother was dead, and something wicked had taken his place.

 

****

The vision was gone, and Bayorn found himself staring down the barrel of an assault rifle. He brought his hands up with a jerk, causing the shackle chain to collide with the bottom of the rifle, simultaneously ripping the rifle from the Mendraga’s hands and breaking the chain. The Mendraga’s mouth gaped, and it was the last expression his face would ever make, for Bayorn immediately hammered the Mendraga on either side of his head with both fists, cracking his skull. Then he opened his hands and placed them on the Mendraga’s head, twisting it until the spine cracked.

“Holy shit!” Saul shouted. “What in the hell just happened?”

“I killed a Mendraga with my bare hands,” Bayorn said.

“I hope that pun was intended,” Saul said.

“What is a pun?”

“Never mind. But that’s not what I was talking about, anyways,” Saul said. “Where did you go? You were talking about someone named Sartruvus, and about Abraxas as well.”

“It is none of your concern,” Bayorn said, eyeing Saul. He did not trust this Eursan, though he did not quite know why. Perhaps it was the way his eyes kept darting around, or the posture of his body. It looked tense, like he was about to break out into a run at any moment. “We should keep moving. Someone will find this Mendraga, and we need to be gone when they arrive.”

“Yeah, great, smart guy, he was the one that was taking us to the slave bear encampment. How do you recommend we get there now?”

“We could follow them,” Bayorn said, pointing at a group of hammerheads. “They seem to know where they’re going.

****

Adum walked down empty streets that were cluttered with trash, far from the pristine grounds that the Fulcrum citizens enjoyed. Behind him, six brutish hammerheads carried the platform through which Representative Ankor Watt had made her presentation to the god-king. Adum hadn’t understood too much of what had been said, but he’d been able to discern that it hadn’t gone the way the representative had wanted.

But this was of little concern to Adum. He was more or less content with his existence. He served his masters, the Corpus Verum, and they were kind to him, providing him with enough food to feed himself, his wife, and his son.

But he did not like the god-king Abraxas. His words filled Adum with distrust, and his soldiers did not treat Adum’s people very well. They often made jokes about them, or tripped them when they were walking by. This made Adum very unhappy. He wished the Corpus Verum would make Abraxas go away, but for some reason it seemed the Corpus Verum needed his help. They had made some sort of bargain with him, and he had twisted it. And now he would not leave.

Adum and the other hammerheads made their way to the street level entrance of the place where the Corpus Verum slept, underneath the great palace where Abraxas held court. As they walked, Adum took note of a man watching them. The man had an unusually large Tarsi in tow, and he seemed to be watching them as well. But Adum did not know what to make of this odd couple, so he pushed them out of his mind and continued with his task.

The city was drawing the curtain down and preparing for the evening. Adum and his cohorts were the only souls to be found on the desolate thoroughfare, save for the man and the Tarsi. Night time was a bad time. The city was more or less secure, but sometimes bad things happened in the shadows. Citizens were locking their doors and halogens were clicking on, illuminating the evening’s rest in the squat rectangular domiciles that sprawled all around him. Adum envied their clean, well-lit homes. He thought of his dirt-floor plywood shack and his computing device that he had scavenged from a dumpster.

Above him, Abraxas’s pyramid loomed. It dominated the sky, commanding one’s gaze to fall upon it. It looked out of place, an ornate ziggurat surrounded by a sea of lush grass and groomed topiaries. It was if a god himself had flung it from the heavens, shattering the windows of the long-abandoned steel and glass spires that surrounded it.

There was indeed a god dwelling there now, but he was not a good one.

Adum mustered his courage as he made his way up toward the entrance to the sleepers’ chambers. Two Mendraga overseers guarded the front entrance, and he could feel their gaze burning on his skin as he approached. He took a moment to hunch his shoulders a bit and take on the lumbering gait of a worker drone.

“What are you doing out here, dirtbag? Curfew is about to drop.”

“Uh, return 3D vid platform,” he stammered, scratching his head like an ape. “Sleepers.”

“Very well. Let me see some ID.”

Adum procured his ID badge from his pocket and held it up to the overseer.

“Emergency,” he muttered.

“Okay. Go ahead. Make it quick.” The Mendraga overseer punctuated his sentence by raking his index finger, knife-like, across his own throat.

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” Adum said, not quite able to bring his gaze up to the Mendraga’s eyes.

The guards spoke to one another, laughing, using some words that Adum didn’t understand, and speaking too fast for him to comprehend it anyway. But he could tell the laughter was at his and his brethren’s expense. The other hammerheads did not react, so intent were they on delivering their payload. They paid the Mendraga no mind and seemed oblivious to their insults.

This is what we were made for. To serve the sleepers. To be strong. To keep Hastrom City alive.

He smiled at his fellow hammerheads, who responded in kind.

Adum had often wondered why his brain was more capable than theirs, why he could catch the words better, why his thoughts were brighter and faster. They called him “The Bright One” in their crude tongue. Though an Eursan would consider this a compliment, among his people it was almost an insult. He was different than them, there was no denying it. His body wasn’t quite as strong as theirs, and his features were less crude. The other hammerheads shunned him, but he did not care. It was this very reason—his being born different—that had caused the sleepers to choose him. There had been others like him from time to time, they had told him—others who had been capable of doing and knowing things that the others could not.

Just beyond the guard post was a storage room, and Adum barked at the hammerheads to place the platform inside it. Then he told them to wait for him after they completed their job.

He made his way down empty corridors to a steel elevator door flanked by security cameras. The doors to the elevator were made of thick carbo-steel and were nigh impenetrable, and a circular cutout hovered ominously in the ceiling above the elevator. Adum knew that opening was where an automated turret would descend and render into a red paste anyone whose ID was rejected.

With trepidation, Adum placed his ID in the slot and pressed his hand into a sensor panel filled with a transparent gel. The gel was cool and soothing as it enveloped his hand, recording each fingerprint swirl, each pore on his skin.

“ADUM 04219, PERMISSION GRANTED. PLEASE WATCH YOUR STEP. HAVE A NICE DAY.”

He sighed, wiped sweat from his brow, and entered the elevator. Inside were no buttons, for the elevator only went to one place. The doors whined and grated as they came to a shuddering close. Like just about everything else in Hastrom City, they worked, but only in begrudging fashion.

The elevator began its slow descent. Like Zedock’s silo, the sleepers’ domain was hewn into the earth, many feet below the surface, built to withstand the destruction of Hastrom City. Even if the entire city were consumed in a maelstrom of fire, the sleepers would continue their long sleep a mile below the surface.

At last the elevator ground to a halt, hissing and groaning as it settled. The doors opened and Adum 04129 stepped into the decontamination chamber. Blast-proof, hermetically sealed doors slid down from their slots, and cylindrical tumblers clacked into place. A hail of white mist poured down from the ceiling, blowing Adum 04129’s coarse black hair in all directions. Sterile, hospital-grade air and the sting of ionic disinfectant seared his nose.

“ADUM 04129, DECONTAMINATION COMPLETE.”

The locking procedure reversed itself, and Adum stepped into the sleepers’ den. He was greeted by the familiar ion scent, and his ears drank in the gentle whir of exhaust fans and the low hum of the server bays.