Saints of the Void: Atypical (7 page)

The building that had its face blown off was being
repaired, a time consuming task. Complex scaffolding was set up,
and workers were operating proficiently, like hive workers in
service of a terrifying, obsessive-compulsive queen. The less
significant damage on other buildings caused by fast-flying debris
was being handled by simpler scaffolding and a smaller workforce.
The broken windows had already been covered with thin, weatherproof
plastic, a common enough material that tons of it were easy to get
a hold of. If past industrial accident patch-ups were any
indication, glass would be brought in for the panes in a day or
two.

As planned, Dastou left Saan-Hu in charge of the
troops and science team. She was ranked as a Staff Sergeant, so she
could easily keep the six agents in check with her signature
combination of stern looks, grunts, and occasional threats. They
would start by pouring over the embassy’s external camera data from
the incident and ensuing repairs. Part of that task would be to
delete specific chunks of footage from local servers once backups
were established and encrypted. When the video manipulation was
done, they’d get to their second job of doing geological surveys to
study the volcano that the city was built on top of.

Trenna and Nes left the embassy with the Saint, the
corporal carrying the same weapons and gear he grabbed as a
precaution directly after the rocket blasts – assault rifle, marble
ordinance, throat mic, and mini med kit. This time, Nes also put on
proper black-and-vermillion battle attire, lined with filament
armor, that allowed him to buckle his gun to his back. Trenna wore
a new outfit comprised of a white t-shirt over a black one, dark
blue jeans, and black running shoes. Saan-Hu was far showier than
that, so the administrator was probably disappointed in what the
girl decided to wear. Trenna’s jet black hair was pulled back into
a stylish pony tail. The new eyeglasses were her own prescription,
and she took pleasure in seeing everything clearly at great
distances.

Dastou took only a throat mic package and a combat
knife. He sewed the sheath into his waist-length leather jacket at
just about the small of his back, concealing the weapon. It was the
only time in his life he ever carried a weapon outside of a
practice area or target range.

*****

The alley that the criminals used to flee led to a
street parallel to the one where the attack took place, and Trenna
had them cross to the other side of that road, too. She led Dastou
and Nes north for four blocks to a stairwell leading down to the
old subway system. There were other entrances nearby, but the girl
said this was how she always got in and out of the subway since the
others were blocked. A dust-covered sign, which mentioned the train
lines that ran through this station and featured a detailed map,
was the only really dirty thing at ground level. The cleanliness
difference between this part of the street and the area where the
attack happened, even after repairs were well underway, was
striking.

Curved half-tubes of glass and metal ran along ran
along the sidewalks on both sides of the street here. Those
“windows” existed to save electricity, lighting the subways during
daylight hours. Dastou walked past the stairwell Trenna led them to
and tried to look into the station, but the knee-high glass was so
gross on the inside that he could barely make out anything besides
basic shapes.

“There’s nothing different about this place, as far
as I can tell,” said Dastou.

“Trust me, sir, you’ll see when we’re inside,” Trenna
responded.

The Saint looked towards something a bit further
north of their location: a Mover’s Garden. Those areas were parks
situated near large subway stations, the big domed glass ceilings
of the main boarding area used as decoration. Mover’s Gardens were
practically insults to the Cypher, taking advantage of something
created strictly out of necessity to craft something of artistic
merit. The dome ceilings were used by citizens to help design a
park filled with artistic fauna layouts, running and biking trails,
play spaces for children, and enough space for local birds like
ducks to come for a little free food thrown their way. Those parks
felt... free, whatever that meant.

The three of them went down the stairwell when Dastou
came back to reality, into Stone-State Central Junction’s south
end. After walking down steps that were far less dusty than they
would be if the place was truly derelict, they were a story
underground. The ticket office was a few paces ahead, the door wide
open. Planks of wood that had barred it when the place was
abandoned were placed neatly next to the wall. The turn-stiles were
not blocked, but the gate in front of it was, making it easier to
go in and out via the adjacent cashier’s station since it had a
doorway.

The group walked through the ticket office, past a
long wooden desk, drilled into the wall below a series of teller
windows, three comfortable-looking seats, and three coin registers.
The tills were an oddity: there was no such thing as paper money,
but each register had five rectangular slots for the stuff, right
above the coin sections. It was just a strange little tidbit about
the world everyone accepted without complaint.

On the other side of the cashier station and closer
to the boarding platforms, there was enough natural light entering
from the glass tubing above them to allow for easy navigation.
Dastou daydreamed again, remembering times when these places were
actually in use. These rail systems were a beacon of human energy
for about a century and a half, with eighty-five percent of all
travel done by subway once the tunnels and trains were completed.
The seven biggest hubs around the world were like miniature cities.
The track paths were a beautiful, serpentine underground road,
sometimes going above the streets or below waterways. Each ocean in
the world had at least three two-way tunnels a few meters below the
surface, an accomplishment that even the Saints didn’t fully
comprehend.

When the trolley system was put in place about eight
years ago, these tunnels were scavenged for materials, with many
subway cars retrofitted to be made into trolley cars. Kilometers
upon kilometers of steel tracks were torn up, smelted, and remade
into parts for the new magnetic street-level railway. Upon
completion of that new system, the underground hubs were deserted
and closed off. From the looks of this space, though, a reclaiming
was taking place.

Past the cashier’s station, the trio came to a short
hallway that ended at a balcony. That balcony was half-a-story
above the boarding areas, sets of stairs leading down to platforms
on the left, right, and straight ahead. Trenna confidently led them
forward, onto steps headed for the center platform. The living
spaces of what she earlier referred to as “my people” were clearly
visible as they walked down.

With every descending step, Dastou absorbed another
detail about the space. Beds were lined along the walls of the left
and right platforms, made of sewn-together fabrics placed on top of
discarded cushions and, rarely, actual old mattresses. There were a
couple dozen bed areas overall, and each could be made more
personal by drawing curtains together. Those privacy shields were
made of thin bedspreads, opaque plastic sheeting, table cloths and,
rarely, actual old curtains. The “rope” the random stuff was hung
on was simply good nylon string. Personal effects on makeshift
tables – watches, keys, picture frames, jewelry, and the like –
could be seen in most of the sleeping sections. A few spots meant
for congregation or conversation featured tattered couches and
chairs.

Dastou loved this place.
Loved
it. There was
an appealing contrast against the nearly-always clean streets and
more or less sterile architecture of most of the world. It also
showed ingenuity and effort in the attempt to live someplace closed
off to everyone else.

“I remember liking it here too, sir,” said Trenna,
likely because she noticed the small grin the Saint couldn’t keep
off his face when she glanced back to see exactly how far behind
Dastou and Nes were. “We never took part in the infrastructure
events and were ignored by them. It was liberating.” Her voice had
a note of pride in it.

“Do you know how or when you all started getting
overlooked like that?” asked Nes.

“No, not really,” Trenna responded.

Upon reaching the center platform at the bottom of
the stairs, she turned left, hopped down onto the track gap, and
kept walking towards a tunnel that would lead to the main boarding
hub. The gravel under their feet echoed, creating a pattern that
Dastou found pleasing. If the steel tracks were still here, he
would have tried to make a more complex pattern by combining the
gravel echo with reverberation from the metal. He laughed in his
head at what Trenna would have thought after seeing the being she
worshipped dancing like a child to funny noises.

After a few meters on in the gap, the nylon for the
curtains crisscrossed above the travelers. Beaded bracelets of
varying colors and patterns were strung up near where the girl
jumped down, and Dastou had to stop himself from taking the pretty
things and stuffing them into his pockets.

“It was like we woke up near here one day,” she
added, bringing Dastou back from fantasy land. “A lot of us went
back for mementos, pictures of family and stuff. It was bizarre.
Our belongings were still there, but everyone acted like we were
strangers if they saw us. Like we were, um...”

“Deleted?” suggested Dastou.

“Yes, sir, that fits I think. It was heartbreaking
for some. The ones that couldn’t cope, though there were only a
few, they...”

“Chose another way out,” said the Saint, interrupting
the girl’s pause out of a sense of politeness.

Trenna swallowed to give herself a moment for
composure. “Yes, sir.”

“How many of you lived here?” asked Nes, trying to
keep Trenna from focusing on the negative.

“Thirty-one total as of the last time I remember
being around, which was maybe last night, but I’m not sure how long
I was knocked out. We were all close, some more than others. I
think we had to be for survival. None of us could endure in the
world without the help of the others. We shared responsibilities in
getting food and other basic supplies, or to figure out where a
group was being hypnotized so we could take advantage.”

“Take advantage as in steal everything you can, I
bet,” said Nes in a light enough tone so it didn’t sound like an
accusation.

“Yeah, that’s a big part of it,” admitted Trenna with
no shame at all. Nes chuckled at her response.

“And I bet living in the subway made it convenient,”
said Dastou. “A fast and easy to understand path to a lot of places
that was also technically invisible due to being unused.
Clever.”

“Uh... thank you, Mr. Dastou,” said Trenna,
stuttering a bit after the earnest compliment.

The trio got to the tunnel edge and walked only a
couple of paces before stopping to look around. Despite the grime
on the inside of the glass above, a decent amount of light was
coming from the dome ceiling windows of the place, where the
Mover’s Garden was. It made nearly all of the open space clearly
visible.

Just like the smaller boarding area that led them
here, there were platforms for people to stand and wait left,
right, and center. Sets of escalators flanked the large space,
leading to and from the second floor. A pedestrian bridge was about
thirty meters ahead and above them, used to link the upper tier and
give a clear view of the entire station. A third set of escalators
was dead center of that elevated walkway, serving the middle
platform.

Long-ago-shuttered businesses lined the second tier
on both sides, where people would socialize before their train
arrived, sometimes long before. Dastou always guessed that maybe
the people subconsciously understood they were being herded to
work, and plenty of socializing made them feel better. Left-behind
tables, chairs, and other amenities for the shops and restaurants
littered that second floor. None of it was useful enough for the
Social Cypher to recycle when compared to making newer items, so
Trenna’s group will have scavenged it more deeply and more
recently.

Something that might help with all that tedious
scavenging were those
five huge construction lights
visible
on the second floor. They were the kind that held six rows of six
powerful bulbs and featured a bulky generator at the bottom instead
of a quadropod stand. One was on the pedestrian walkway, slightly
to the left of that centered escalator. Then there was a pair of
the big pieces of equipment on each balcony above the space just
past the tunnels; all five were covered in tan tarps.

It was out of the ordinary that the equipment was
here, yes, but they may have broken down during the scrapping of
the place and been left by the worker bees. The ones on the
balconies were several paces away from the waist-high borders,
their centered hydraulic pole extended for maximum height, the same
way they’d be set up to look down into quarries. Even under tarps,
it was obvious that the spotlight sections were aimed down at where
the tunnel let the trio into the main hub. So how are all five of
these machines broken down, in those perfectly placed flanking
positions? And aimed at the only place they could possibly use to
enter the space?

Dastou noticed on either side of him were sets of
steps carved into the concrete, meant for maintenance crews that
needed access to the track level, a safer alternative than jumping
a meter down into the gaps. Those steps would make good cover, too,
if he laid down on them, which was an odd thing to think at that
moment. A Saint needed to trust his instincts when strange warning
signs and suspicions started popping up from background information
to top-of-mind, so...