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Page 32.
 As they moved through this underworld, Jared became all the more conscious of life, and death, and truth all around him. His galaxy, his cosmos, had been founded as an empire of greed and power. Maybe that was the way of all things—the struggle to survive, the constant combat, displays of power, the games on gladiator sands…
Humans had taken the atomic stuff of life itself, their own DNA, and fashioned playthings for themselves or to sell to the idle rich. Brains grown to fly starships but never to taste or feel or smell, but perhaps to despair for centuries pushing cargo and settlers among the stars. Brain boxes, they were called. Or a casual sketch like Lelli or Stella… was that really lawful?
Somehow, there was justice in the overthrowing of that human order. Were the aliens any better, or merely another form of predator that would do anything to survive and protect its brood? Philosophy and anoxia and melancholia and phantasmagoria seemed to grow around him like throbbing fungi in the walls. I am losing my mind…
That firm, loving hand grasped his own hand and kept pulling him along.
So cold!
He looked up, shivering. They’d stumbled into a different region of the subterranean labyrinth somehow, and now stood side by side leaning against a white-washed wall.
Cold all around. Strange new light here. Instinctively Jared looked up. Light—good, hard, cold sky light—shone through the ventilation grills, one grill over the other, story over story, losing themselves toward the distant daylight.
Stella looked up also. “That’s the way out.”
“Yes. We just need to get there before we drown down here, or the beasts get us.”
It was still a wan light. It was more depressing than no light at all, because it seemed so far away, tantalizing and unreachable.
The strange cistern smell drew deeper horror into his soul. Walking in the eerie light of bacterial lights dying after these after these centuries of neglect, Jared began to hear a steady slapping sound. Stella, taking his hand again, also looked puzzled. Louder and louder the sound grew, until he knew it was water, falling in torrents from the ceiling and gushing out of the unmortised walls. Farther on the corridor dipped downward, and water flowed hard down there.
He and Stella Impulsively turned and ran another way.
An overwhelming vapor of water was in the air like a death sentence. Water murmured distantly, dripping in cascades from ceilings throughout the Olympia House.
Once he tripped over something in the middle of the floor. Gingerly he probed with his hands, unable to see. His fingers tightened around a thick bar of metal. It was a grill. That meant there were more floors below, and they would have to fill with water before it could ascend to this level.
Jared listened as water swirled below him, and he smelled something like cold breath brought in with a November wind.
The water was less than six inches below him already. He saw a momentary dull glitter and it was instantly extinguished by filth, or possibly drifting fur.
“It’s dead,” Stella said with quiet finality.
If they didn’t get out soon, they’d be drifting along the ceiling just like that poor beast! He closed his eyes at the brief vision of a heavy, motionless body drifting swaying along the corridor below, along the water-filled canal, already far, far away in the subterranean current.
Those huge, invisible alien animals resumed howling their grief-stricken, heart-broken funeral dirge. It rose into a blood-curdling, terrible chorus. They sang their death chant somewhere—maybe while feasting on the grisly remains of their keepers?
All that rage against the system… against the dying city that had done this to them…
Now they were walking uphill again, passing cells that showed some signs of life.
There came a shrill wailing of women prisoners.
“We’re closer to the human side of the prison now,” Stella said. She held her head, looked upward, and strained the circling, dancing yellow and blue geometries of her face. Then she stopped, shook her head, and said: “Still no signal.”
They continued on.
They stood before a stairway, and for a minute or so didn’t know it was a stairway.
Jared and Stella climbed on, and climbed up until they lost all sense of direction except upward. He all sense of time, all sense of distance. They climbed through dark areas and lighter areas until at last they began to perceive a dim shimmering around the corner, up another flight of stairs.
Coming to a landing, they knew they were on the right path.
The lights here were very bright in comparison to those below, and the walls were newer, though just as filthy…these were not black, just excrement-brown, and lacking the gougings.
An endless wide corridor stretched ahead. On either side were very large cages, and in the cages were the lowest human being Jared had ever seen. He saw them in the dimness of the recesses, bodies filthy and hair-choked, flaming with disease. As Jared passed slowly, they cried out in a tongue that achingly recalled the nearly forgotten language of the living. Jared began to run the gauntlet, holding Stella’s hand. She ducked and made her profile as small as she could, staying close behind him as he towed her along.
Here a gray face implored, there a red-eyed face cursed him, here a terror-filled face peered out of darkness, there a gloomy mute glowered at him. Filthy, crippled hands reached out to them from behind bars. Huge eyes implored…
Jared ran until he fell and breathed flecks of blood on a concrete stair.
Stella sounded lumbering and winded behind him. How long could she go on?
Metal crashed behind him. There were howls of joy, as a number of half-men broke out. Jared pushed Stella ahead to protect her. He heaved himself up with a last effort and stumbled up the few remaining stairs. Where now?
Ahead, walls.
An open door, sagging at the hinges.
Freedom…
Jared held Stella close as they jumped out among them into a wind of clean air and ran in the darkness.
Gunfire broke out somewhere, and guards shouted to each other.
Lights flared up and engines raced as the prison force rallied to close their horror back up, to keep the underworld in its place.
Animals howled—faintly now, because Jared and Stella had found their way back to the world of the living.
Their breathless, terrified running stopped when his head bumped against something.
What? He stood holding his head, and laughed.
He had bumped his head on the bottom of a seat. There were tens of thousands of these seats, attached to metal and concrete, overlooking an empty arena.
Jared hauled himself up into the high, cold, busy night of the light-filled city. It was a homecoming after generations. He stood among the high bleachers and the wild wind was music in his head. He pulled Stella up with him, and they sat marveling, side by side.
Their run of terror was over. They had made it alive out of the underworld of Mercury FPC. They had encountered brutal truth and faced it heroically. Now they could resume normal, tiny lives out here in the real world, even as it was falling apart but was a long way from the horror they had seen in the depths.
He looked down into the giant arena. It was empty, the perfect picture of a prison at night. In the center was the pit, the combat area.
He looked with detachment at the glittering silver tongue of water extending like heavy, molten metal to the center of the arena. It was an empty-vessel arena, discarded, tilted and half-wet, half-dry like an old can. Something—maybe a huge bomb somewhere in the city, dropped by Raskian orbital subs, had rocked the earth, shifted the ground, and tilted this arena. It had dislodged the sea of water circulating in the O House, and caused massive flooding.
The gleaming dangerous half-moon of water on the sands below seemed almost solid, so still was it. But Jared knew that, inch by inch, the cohesive teeth of water were extending themselves across the sand. A drowning world, tape spinning off its silent reel, moving outward from the strengthless sun of lost youth…
Where to go?
Nowhere.
It was a good night for the stars, looking beyond the occasional combat raider, swinging search lights, ragged clouds and gleaming moon. High above the city hung the glowing discs of the superlevels, small cities in their own right, shining in the drifting, patchy clouds of pinfire. The many moons of Mercury hung waxen, surrounded by heavy traffic, traffic high and purposeful. And Jared wished he could be part of all that highness and purposefulness.
Somewhere out here was Aldebaran II, a barren hulk of acid seas and deadly gases. There was Raskia, ever watchful evil eye of a Cyclops, glaring into the very bowels of her arch-enemy as a madman might look into a jar in which lay exposed the working innards of his victim…
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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