Prisoner 52 (18 page)

Day 19: Predawn

They had made a bargain with the watchman on duty. Leargam told him they would not inform command of his proclivities with the diseased prostitutes that plied their trade from outside the wall if he could be relieved of only one Hazardous Environment Vehicle until dawn. It was agreed to in short order and Tezac climbed into the pilot's womb and attached its NervLink cables to their fixtures across his exo-
suit. The old man did the same in the gunner's cockpit.

The watchman opened the blast doors matched to the space of the vehicle that they had commandeered and he flinched at the alarm that sounded beneath the flurries of the storm. The gate retracted as the red lights beside it spun. Ice crystals burst into the iron dark of the depot that could rend a man, but broke only against the unyielding stone and metal within. Tezac uplifted his hands gradually and thus put the HEV forth out onto the service road
laser-cut into the ice beyond.

They rounded the curvature of the manmade gorge and came upon the gateway of Sector 10 that led
out into town, beyond the safety of the prison. He rolled them to a stop before it and there they waited until a shadow had moved in the light of the booth atop its control tower. It watched them for some small moments, unmoving. Then the great doors parted their interlocking edges and groaned beneath the winds, of a different sort than nature. The shadow disappeared – gone back to sleep, they agreed.

The HEV pulled out into the first of the sprawl's cramped streets, the conglomerated hovels that crowded around them, and the gate slid closed behind them once its sensors had read them as gone. The road lay empty before them save for the shadows made by the neon paradise of its signs and that populated it always.
They drove on through what was a shanty beside the magnificence of the installation that dominated all which lay behind them, the lights of its communcations arrays blinking in the tempestuous night. The automated ploughs their only company.

Soon any
crude replication of life ended and gave way to the glacial wastes which enfolded it. The ice plains stretched out dark and lonely until they were consumed by the night-white of the storm, which roved across the land bitter and lowing its spite at the cruel forces that had begat it in the beginning of everything.

Tezac introduced them to its boundaries and they were taken into the nothingness its obscuration produced. He plotted their course on the womb's hardlight map display, connecting the moving blip that was their vehicle with the coordinates he had found for the old observation post. He guided them blind along the route and through the snowfall and the hail that shattered upon the thick armor of the tank.

The treads rumbled across the rocks and rifts of the terrain, followed the dips and curvatures of massive bowl valleys that seemed in some way that he could not place to house secrets. The way still lakes do in the grey of the morning, when the mist rises from the surface and suggests some rightly hidden place had now been found. But the rearing of sudden mountains into the headlamps of the HEV transported him back to the task at hand.

The nose of the craft dipped suddenly and an inestimable blackness broadened before them, the rock walls of the chasm hardly
divested of the darkness before their light was swallowed. Tezac drew them to a stop upon the stony precipice and heard it crack beneath the tank's weight, watched the rock tumble free into the empty abyss. They dropped a short distance, as though the cliff had given way a little, and began to tilt forward and the hull of the tank to groan.

"Tezac." Leargam said.

"I know."

"Tezac."

"I'm on it."

He activated the repulsor modules along the floor of the HEV and it blew from the earth as though it had never been meant for it. It sailed askance as the winds blew about them, end over end, and then crashed into the rock of an outcropping on the other side. Tezac motioned them away to the right and they levelled out onto the glacier again, down from the mountain. Then on, they barrelled less across the planet surface.

Tezac shook his head and rode with the contours of the land‘s journey and said, "Close call."

"Try not to make any more." Leargam said over the wombs' frequency.

Soon a shape manifested from the blizzard under the light of the moons, a diamond of metal in the dark and overlooking the wide land from where it stood upon one of the few hills there. Tezac drew alongside it and ground the HEV to a halt, powered it down. They unhooked the NervLink cabling and ejected from the wombs. Tezac dropped to the ground from the opened hatch atop the vehicle and Leargam after him. Both brought their rifles to bear for reasons for which they could not account.

They trudged up the slope through the deep snow and circled round to the doorway that was ensconced out from the storm, tucked back within. It stood still and silent at their approach and even more so as they came to stand before it. Frosted and barren of life as they were, the storm steadily consigning it to all that was forgotten out there in its embrace.

"No power." Leargam said and let the muzzle of his rifle drop, looked to Tezac. "Why would there be."

"There's a portable battery in the HEV."

"It won't help out here."

"Stand back." Tezac said and turned about and walked off into the storm.

"Where are you going?"

"Get the battery!" He called back and then disappeared into the snowfall.

Leargam looked after where he had been and then shook his head, made for the vehicle. He slung his rifle and climbed onto the ladder that led to the opened hatch and dropped down inside. The old man climbed through to the back and maneuvered around the auxiliary seat into the cargo hold. He rooted through the supply lockers therein until he stumbled upon a case stowed away in the last of them toward to the rear boarding ramp, closed against the winds. 'Emergency Self-Powered Generator', it read and beneath it: 'Warning: Temporary Use Only'. He put it under one arm and mounted to the interior ladder for the second time, emerged into the ice and eddies of snow in time enough to see Tezac bounding across the glacial earth and faster than he had ever seen a mortal being move.

There was a great clang that would have woken the world over had the storm not drowned out any noise but its own. He saw from atop the HEV Tezac stumble backward outside the cover of the gateway and then rest against its walls. He slid down the ladder at once and rushed over to him as soon as his feet met the
ice. But all that was amiss with the giant was that the shoulder plating of his exo-suit was flattened and curled at the edges. Thus he looked to the gate of the observation post and saw where the doors had been forced to part, where they bent inward at the site of the impact.

Tezac approached them and pulled with all his might on either side, at turns. Slowly they were drawn far enough apart that he could get between them and in the narrow space brace his boot on the half before him and his shoulders on that which was behind him. The metal groaned as he pushed it along its track so, misshappen with time and the elements and finally in the last moments by its builders.
They came to where they had been stoved apart and would go no further. Tezac relaxed into the wider ingress he had made and waved Leargam through.

They entered the dark of the observation outpost and raised their rifles at its shadows.  Their boots scraped with every step against the rime that coated the floor, and the debris
which littered it and that they kicked through. Cold death was all that greeted them, a heavy stillness and gloom spent so long alone that it scurried from the light as a living thing. The ice made shelves upon higher edifices; the frost, ferns across the walls and a mockery of an untouched paradise that that world had never known.

They activated the flashlights of their helmets with a flick of their eyes across the visors' displays and the beams rolled across the fallen ductwork and wiring that hung from the darkened recesses above like so many curtains of vines. Their light fell then in its course on the heart of the atrium and there lay the interlocking spheres and orbits of a symbol that had been enshrined there long ago, statuesque and strange. Telling of some untold power, as
with all the epigraphs of history, and saying in its presence: 'here lie ones that were once great, but lie still'.

"This is a Cosmordium outpost." Leargam said and let fall his rifle to one hand at his side, looked up at the sculpture and levelled a finger at it.

"It was." Tezac said and started up the left of the two stairwells that ran to either side around it.

"I thought they were all destroyed."

              "They were supposed to be. But I guess the Conciliators were content to let nature do their work for them, once they'd folded all the Collegia up into the Citadel."

"You know, it's hard to believe sometimes." Leargam said and shook his head at the darkened, ruined monument to
man which still retained for a student its magnificence. "We really made it out this far way back then. With less than half of what we know now."

"Bring that battery up here, would you?" Tezac called down from somewhere up above.

"Shame," The old man said and let his eyes wander away at last and mounted the steps to his right. "Real godsdamned shame."

He reached the terminus of the stair and stepped over the supplies that were spilled
sparsely there, frozen to the steel of the floor. He followed the path they made to the storage lockers along the wall to his right and rooted through them. Readied meals; cartons that went to some waste-filtration device; a medical kit with its contents scattered about where it lay opened as if it to bite at the earth; a can of genuine coffee once he rolled it face-up. This last he took up with an excitement only it could bring, but he found it empty and so chucked it over the railing behind him and heard it rattle as empty across the level below them.

"Looks like they were in here for the long haul." He said to Tezac. "Then got out in a hurry."

"Not all of them." Tezac said and pointed with his head to the chair beside him as he fiddled with the circuit board he had defaced upon the bank of consoles there.

Leargam went over to the skeleton that was there and still clung to the last, parting vesitges of life that show themselves only in the decay of it. The stylized vestments of his order of old still clothed him and in the condition that they had been. He traced the embossed stars and imagined solar waves upon the icy leathers and so came upon the hole that was in its skull, amidst the scraggly hairs that yet remained
and a spider web of cracks stemming from its edges.

"Went down with your ship." Leargam muttered. "I wonder who shot him."

"Shine your light inside."

He glanced over his shoulder at Tezac, shrugged and did so. He found therein the thick, pale shell of an insect. Eyeless, pudgy and a dozen legs to it - long dead. Around it a thousand others in miniature simulacrum.

"Borer-beetle." Tezac said. "So no one could lift anything from the neural pathways."

"You know a lot about this shit."

"They teach you every year at the Citadel. About the old guilds and their downfall." Tezac said and bent to peer deeper into the machine at which he worked. "Why do you think there aren't any new ones?"

"I hadn't really thought about it."

"Do you have that battery?"

"Right here." Leargam said and pulled the case up to lay it on the terminals before them. "Gods, these are all manual."

"It's going to take some doing." Tezac said. "Wiring this into the old conduits. I'll need a sauder gun."

"Did you bring one?"

"The HEV will have one. But there should be a Manifold in the lockers over there, to put off going out in the storm." He said and pointed them out along the left wall.

Leargam's steps faded across the frozen metal and he heard him begin to sift through the tools stockpiled there. Tezac undid the pressure seals of the generator's crate and hefted the heavy cylinder out of the foam. He looked up with it in his hands at the shielding drawn over the glass dome of the installation, blocking out starlight and moonlight and the deepening universe.
Then he bent down to excavate the old drained power core and cast it off to join the rest of time's salvage.             

He placed the new energy cell amidst the cut off wiring of its predecessor and waited for Leargam to return with the heavy gauntlet of conjoined contraptions that was the Manifold. He deactivated the seal of his exo-suit in wait of it and removed his glove and, when the old man handed him the device, placed it overtop his hand. He felt it modulating the neuro-sheath within
to fit the new dimensions and then the electrical impulse that ran up his arm and told him it was ready for use.

"Better watch you don't lose that hand." Leargam said. "Visor reads 200 below out here."

"It read 200 below that night you found me out in town." Tezac said and punched the keys upon the back of the old glove. "Or did you forget the reason we're out here?"

Leargam turned away and went to the railing, listening there to the zaps of the sauder
module as he looked down on all that had been left behind. He saw on the far wall below now, hanging grand above the doorway, a flag of the Concilium of Man in the old style: the hands upon the chain of unity without so much black in it. For all the darkness of that age, it was poorly reflected in mankind. Or so he thought, as all old men do of the days that have gone down. The memory lay tattered in his mind now as the flag that hung upon the wall in that lost and desolate place, hidden out beyond all that was dark and cold.