Despite the more powerful servos and power plant, the only outwardly visible change was the larger thermal manifold and the increased bulk of the mechanical backpack. From the front, only the runes, glyphs, and sigils etched into the plates had changed. There was still a metal-bound book hanging from a chain welded to his left pauldron. His faceplate was still a blank metal hood with blue eye lenses. They also had not changed the basic control schema. Cables still ran from the operator's harness to variable resistors that controlled how fast the various servos moved in mimicry of the wearer's motion. The harness, however, was no longer a mesh that could snag on clothing and fasteners. It was a single membrane threaded with coolant tubes.
The tunnel joined with another in a Y-intersection. The combined tunnel ran off to the front-right. A glow coming from the tunnel to Syd's left made him pause. "Is there supposed to be light here?" he whispered.
"Your voice is not going to carry outside that helmet, speak up."
Syd repeated his question, forcing himself to speak at a normal volume.
"That's probably from the active line. No one is going to head down to where they've already torn up the tracks. Take the right-hand passage and continue until you spot a sump under the tunnel. It may or may not be covered by a metal grate."
"You're not sure?"
"It's supposed to be covered, but the tunnel's been abandoned. The grate could have been stolen and sold for scrap."
"What's this sump look like?" Syd asked as he advanced down the darkened passage.
"It's a trench cut into the floor of the tunnel to drain water into a pump that's meant to raise it to the level of the storm drains. What we're really interested in is the pump house maintenance run."
"Right."
"Now you're not bullshitting me about being able to get in once I get you to the station, are you?"
"I said I can get it open, Hephaestus. I meant what I said."
Hephaestus hissed. "You'd better pray nobody caught that."
"Sorry."
"Have you spotted the sump yet?"
"They stole the grate," Syd said, looking over the three-foot-wide trench choked with debris. Much of it was an unidentified fibrous mass that had been soaked in water and adhered together when it dried. Syd guessed it might have once been paper.
"Look to your left."
"There's an open doorway."
"Go inside and take the stairs down."
Syd hopped over the trench, uncertain of how deep it was or how much weight the debris would hold. A pedestrian lip started on the far side, holding a walkway a few feet above the track level. Syd clamored up it to reach the doorway. The opening was slightly narrower than his armor's shoulders, but he was able to angle himself to pass though. A crumbling brick and cement block staircase led down. Syd gave a wary look at the cracked risers and missing chunks. With his armor's bulk, he didn't have too many options on footholds. He descended cautiously.
"This stairwell is not in good condition."
"Just tell me when you reach the bottom."
"What's below the subway?"
"Another subway. The Deep Line was actually bored first. The guy who dug it had earth-moving powers, but did not have a good understanding of structural engineering. To compensate, he dug deeper, so there would always be enough ground to hold the city up above his tunnels."
"Is it still in use?"
Hephaestus snorted. "They shut it down in the fifties after a supervillain attack damaged it too badly. The current network was already in operation by then anyway."
"Is there anything below that?"
"Possibly partially-excavated fallout shelters that were never completed. Depends on where you are talking about."
"So this maintenance run..."
"Connects two sumps through a single pump house. They still drain the deep line so that the water doesn't create sinkholes."
Syd reached the landing and took a breather. It wasn't that he was exerting himself, but the unease of trying not to slip down the damaged stairs had taken a mental toll. "Are we going to lose radio contact?"
"When Rose scouted the route, it installed repeaters. We should be good until you actually get inside. At which point you should be in contact with Kali, who can act as a relay."
"Where is Rose?"
"Waiting for your arrival. There was no point in recalling the robot just to send it back out again."
Syd breathed a sigh of relief as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Here, he stood on slate flagstone pavers on a similar pedestrian accessway. The tunnel was coated in row after row of neat, rectangular tiles, most of which were cracked or had spalled off completely. Behind them, splintered cement and shattered bedrock sores peered out. Off to Syd's right, rubble all but barred the tunnel. To his left, the debris was lighter, but the tunnel didn't look any safer. "This is starting to feel like a whole mess of bad ideas."
"We're already heavily committed to this course of action," Hephaestus said. "We won't have another window like tonight, and Kali is already deployed. We won't get another chance to use it. So buck up and press on. Take the open tunnel. It will end in a concrete wall."
"A concrete wall?"
"They sealed off the Deep Line, the station, and its entrances when the line was abandoned to prevent people from doing what we're attempting now."
"I take it there's a way past?"
"Must I do everything?"
"I could open up the wall, but the Community Fund might notice my method."
"You won't have to. Sixty years of water infiltration has done the job for us. It didn't break the wall, but it opened up a bypass."
"You'd think they'd have noticed that."
"Most people didn't even remember the Deep Line existed. There have been no inspections of the tunnels for decades."
The pale concrete that capped the tunnel still had the texture of the plywood mold used to pour it. The face of it had been impregnated with some sort of sealant compound that had prevented water from infiltrating the concrete proper. The wall to its left hadn't been so lucky. Behind a facing layer of shattered tiles, a few courses of bricks evened out the mouth of the original tunnel. The chamber carved out for the station had cut a few feet deeper on that side. When in operation, the mouth of the tunnel had been perpendicular to the tracks. Decades of dissolving away the lime in the mortar had led to the collapse of the cosmetic extension. A few bricks and tiles were still embedded in the rim of the concrete cap. The gap wasn't expansive, but it was possible to make his way up over the aged brickwork and shimmy through to the station beyond.
Syd dropped down to a span of actual track and turned his gaze to the platform proper. Amidst the Art Deco facade, crumbling tile work and faded adverts, light was seeping in. Syd could tell because color had returned to parts of his vision. The tilework was a hideous institutional green. The adverts showed smiling people in dated fashions shilling a brand of cigarettes Syd had never heard of. Chrome-trimmed ticket booths flanked the doorway through which the light was spilling. A black clad figure of feminine form detached from the shadows by one of the booths. The lithe form made its way to the edge of the platform and stared down at Syd.
"I've found Rose."
"Verified," a female voice said on the same radio channel. The gynoid was too lifelike, it put Syd on edge. It didn't help that the robot had been among a batch of those that had tried to kill him.
"There's also a light source inside the station."
"What kind of light source?" Hephaestus asked. "This place is supposed to be dead."
"Unknown."
"Find out, so we can adapt."
"Rose, remain unseen," Syd said, climbing onto the platform. The robot nodded and slipped back into the darkness. Advancing to the hallway, Syd primed the defensive enchantment
s woven into his armor. He kept them energized, but just below active to avoid the telltale glow. Stepping over the broken turnstiles, Syd crept along the passage towards the light. It came from several portable lamps aimed at a single figure.
Semi-circular rows of kneeling, almost prostrate people stared in blind adoration at the man. The figure was wiry, with bronze hair, a hooked nose, and sharp chin. His dull, amber eyes darted between the gazes of those around him. Aside from the cheap canvas shoes and boxer shorts, he wore a tabard that might once have been a piece of cream-colored drapery. The two-foot-wide strip of cloth ran from his knees, up over his shoulders, and down to his knees again. It was bound at the waist by a length of crimson cord. The edges were trimmed in a similarly-colored material. Crudely stitched into the cloth were signs and sigils that the wearer probably thought looked like magical markings. To Syd's eyes, they looked like the scribblings of a small child who'd managed to grasp that letters had some significance, but had not yet learned how to read.
In the man's left hand, however, was a device he could not possibly have been responsible for crafting. About five feet long, half its length was made up of a wire-wound handle. At one end was a pair of two foot long bladed prongs. At the other was a similar fork of much shorter length. A diffuse glow wafted in the gap between the longer prongs, slowly oscillating along the span. As he gestured at one of several concrete walls capping the exits to what used to be the station lobby, the glow intensified slightly and sped up.
"You see my children, we are close to the nexus we have sought!" A quick glance at the kneeling people showed that none of them were young enough to actually be the man's offspring.
Syd groaned. "A cult."
"Are they going to be a problem?" Hephaestus asked.
"I don't know yet."
"Enlightenment and the promised land are close at hand, my-" He paused at the sight of a hulking suit of plates striding quietly out of the shadows. Syd passed the cultists and stared down their leader. After a moment, Syd switched on the external speaker built into his armor.
"What you are holding is an Arcane Resonator. It is little more than a tuning fork for magical energy. It is simply responding to the residuum from a closed gate," Syd said.
"What would you know of such things?" The cult leader pointed the resonator at Syd in an accusatory fashion. As the tip grew close to Syd's armor, the resonator reacted to the energy priming his defensive enchantments. Being less dormant, the effect was more blatant. The glow turned blue and filled the length of the gap with pulsing oscillations almost too fast for the eye to see. The crowd gasped at the sight.
"The staff of knowledge has never been so alive," the cult leader said in astonishment. Syd suppressed a groan as he realized the man actually believed everything he had told his followers. Instead, he reached out and lifted it from the man's grasp. Had he resisted, Syd would have been easily able to overpower him, but the resonator slipped effortlessly from his fingers.
"This will make my job easier," Syd said, walking over to the blank span of concrete. Blanking out his own energy signature by dropping the primed energy, he held out the resonator towards the wall. Moving it slowly and watching the reaction, he mapped out the locus of the residuum. The cult stared in silent fascination. Finding the spot with the greatest response, Syd held his chained grimoire by the spine and let it fall open. The Tyvek pages fluttered open as the metal covers fell flat. The book was merely a focus, so the content of the turning leaves was of little consequence. Syd kept his mind on the spot and the spell to rip open a collapsed gate.
Syd funneled his energy into the residuum that marked the weak spot in the skin of the world. The cultists were mesmerized by the racing blue light that tore sigils free from the etched trim of Syd's armor and raced along the lines of the metal. With a flash and a flutter, a dark spot appeared on the wall. It gave the briefest glimpse of something on the other side before collapsing back in on itself, its edges wildly vacillating. It pulsed and flickered as Syd fought to wedge open the gap. He stood stock still with the wind whipping about him in much the same way as the glowing markings on his power armor.
With a tortured groan, the gate linking the subway station to the pocket dimension containing Tower Zero of Sterling Towers snapped back to its original shape. Its edges clung to the rim of the space into which the concrete had been cast. Rather than risk his own arm for a test, Syd plunged the fork of the resonator through. It gave off a steady glow, but was otherwise unmolested. The space beyond looked like more subway station, with an information desk and a stairwell behind a cage door. It was less damaged than the one Syd was standing in, having merely gathered dust for decades.
"And the Iron Conjurer has opened the way!" the cult leader declared.
"It is not safe for you to go in there," Syd said. "There are many things that will react poorly to your presence."
"We have come so far, Iron Conjurer, we cannot give up now."
Syd shook his head. As his earpiece spoke up, he realized that he'd never stopped transmitting. "Let the cultists run loose," Hephaestus said. "They can provide an additional distraction to the Community Fund while you get what we came for."
Syd shook his head and strode across the threshold. An ache throbbed behind his eyes and temples as he crossed from the real universe into a pocket dimension. With a sigh, he strode towards the cage blocking the stairs. The cage was no major obstacle. The lock popped under the pressure from his armor's servos. The cultists swarmed past as Syd secured the barricade in its housing above the doorway. Turning off the external audio, Syd spoke. "I am inside. Activate Kali."
Woven throughout Sterling Towers was a series of powerful processing nodes that were home to the AI Shiva. Kali had been built specifically to kill it. With a few keystrokes, Hephaestus triggered Kali. In a few ticks of the system clock, Kali's kill-code had already disabled Shiva's higher functions and replaced them with hooks to Kali's own processes.
"I am online," A flat, synthetic voice said on Syd's radio. "Status: two powered individuals on site, identified as Infernoclast and Earworm. Location, Tower One. Standard SRT distribution pattern identified. No alerts active."
"I need a location on the nanoconstructor."
"Fourteenth floor," Kali said, "Room Fourteen Zero Zero Five."
"Thank you." Syd moved to the elevator lobby and pressed a call button. Over-eager cultists huddled around as he waited for the car.
"Disabling lockout of lower levels on elevator," Kali said.
"Lockout?"
"Soft lock initiated due to decommissioning of station. Not an intrusion countermeasure." The doors on the freight elevator opened and Syd stepped on board. He tried to ignore the cultists as he pressed the button for the fourteenth floor.
"What is on fourteen?" the cult leader asked.
"What I came looking for," Syd said. "But I am afraid you are quite far from your promised land."
Rose stepped into the elevator before the doors closed. The casual manner in which she moved up beside Syd and stood as if this were a day at the office drew looks of surprise and irritation for the cultists, but Syd's lack of a reaction made them hesitant to act. The elevator doors closed and the lift began to rise. A quick head count showed that not all of the cult had joined them. Syd didn't bother to ask where the others had gotten off to.
The hallway the doors opened onto looked like a modern office in several shades of drab. White walls and gray-speckled carpets left the space visually uninteresting. The only marked difference was the heavy metal doors widely spaced along the span. Syd strolled past 14-003, finding 14-005 further down the same wall. "Kali, I am at the door."
"So noted." The door to 14-005 slid open. The space beyond looked like it belonged in a warehouse. The large room was subdivided by shelving, with larger cabinets lining the outer walls. The metal shelves and cabinets were al
l painted a gray a few shades darker than the carpet. Syd glanced at the labels on some of the boxes. 'Inversion Beamer', 'Lotus Siphon', 'Primordium Infusion Detonator', 'Damaged Chronal Cannon', and similarly obtuse terms marked innocuous-looking cardboard.
"What is this, a super-science junk drawer?" Syd asked.
"Effectively, yes," Kali said. "It is the Community Fund's deep storage. Most of it was taken from costumed criminals."
Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Page 108
