The Phoenix Fallacy Book I: Janus (25 page)

The three moved forward together to examine the door, and the glowing panel sprung to life.  It spoke in a jilted voice.  “Iden…cation please.  Stand in … circle ….”

A glowing circle appeared in front of the door.

“Odd, this still has power.  There must be a secondary set of fusion generators for the bunker,” Celes said.
  “Perhaps the same thing supplying the water.”

“The collapsed ceiling must have cut off the rest,” Janus noted.  “Maybe we can open these doors, there’s bound to be something valuable behind them.”  Janus felt a curious excitement begin to take hold of him, like those times so long ago, scrounging in the slums.

“Or something extremely dangerous,” Wouris said simply.  “Either way, we should find out.  Let’s take a look at this ID panel.  We might be able to get around the security system.”

Celes nodded, and pulled some small tools from her suit, carefully examining the glowing panel.  Wouris joined her, and together they probed the hole in the device for a solution to the shut door. 

Meanwhile, Janus took a closer look at door itself, in case Wouris and Celes were unable to open it with finesse. 

He quickly ruled out forcing the door open.  The doors were far too solid to be wrenched open with muscle, and an explosion in the already small and weakened room was out of the question.  He wasn’t even sure it would have worked anyway.
  Celes and Wouris’ voices were a whisper, “What if we cut the wiring here and…”

Janus
moved forward to examine the edges of the doors for a weakness and stepped into the illuminated circle on the floor.  As he did, a strange device descended from the space above him.  It looked like a disembodied eye on a mechanical stalk and bathed him in a soft green light, circling him slowly.  The panel spoke in its broken voice. “Scan… in prog...ess.  Stand by…”  Celes and Wouris both turned to watch.

After a few moments, it spoke again.  “Scan comp… Welcome Executor.”  The sound of heavy locks disengaging could be heard behind the door, and then it swept open, blasting Janus with a rush of air.  Beyond the door lay total darkness, the noticeable thrum of machinery echoing in the distance.

Janus laughed, “Well, that was easy.”

Celes stood up, looking confused.  “What did you do?”

He shrugged, “I asked it politely to open for me.”

Wouris looked sheepish, “Huh, I guess it would have made sense to just test whether the ID machine still worked or not, first.  It’s obviously been damaged and doesn’t recognize people with access anymore.”

“What, don’t you think I’m Executor material?”  Janus asked boldly.

Celes gave him a shove, “Yeah, we’ll all just bow down to your superiority.” 

She stepped into the circle with him, and the strange eye-stalk scanned her as well.  “Err…or… No matching sequence…fou-nd.  Nota-tion made…”

Celes looked at the scanner.  “Odd.  I wonder if—“

BRAAAWWWWWRRR.

A huge, strange roar emanated from the hall; distant, but imposing.  Glowing blue lines appeared on the floor ahead of them, guiding them forward.

“Enough,” Wouris said emphatically, “Let’s check it out before something else happens.”

Chapter 30: The Hive

The three moved as silently as ghosts, the faint sounds of machinery floating down the hall.  The floor sloped downwards, leading them deeper underground.  Another thick door with the Phoenix emblem stood at the end, its panel glowing green. It was unlocked.  The sounds of a factory could be heard much more clearly now, and as the second door slid slowly open, the noise became deafening.  A blast of heat swept across Janus, and he gaped in amazement, stepping slowly onto a balcony overlooking a huge, automated factory.  Innumerable conveyors and cranes carried hundreds, even thousands of Security Trooper suits and weapons.  Great presses molded new Infernus suits, while others were hardened and cleaned in giant vats of chemicals.  Every few moments, a new suit would rush by, disappearing in the mass of machinery and metal that seemed to stretch indefinitely in all directions.

“I’v
e never seen anything like this,” Wouris said, flabbergasted.

“Do you think that this has been running all this time, under the ruins of Phoenix?”  Celes asked in awe.

“Let’s find out.”  Janus cocked his head for them to follow as he descended a set of stairs to their right.  Wide catwalks stretched across the factory floor, which seemed to be a mass of gears and molten metal, following the trail of conveyors and cranes to where the Infernus suits disappeared.

The factory was immense, and Janus did his best to soak it all in, pausing to watch as
myriad daeduluses with heavy, metal arms screwed prefabricated jump jets in the feet and back of each Infernus.  One conveyor had a line of Zeus rifles slowly filing along it, all disappearing through a dark hole in the wall of the factory.  Unable to hear each other over the din, the three used hand signals to communicate, and Janus directed them to another heavy door on the opposite side of the factory. 

BRAAAWWWWWRRR.

The three froze at the screeching and clanking of metal – an unfinished suit was lodged in the assembly line.  Cranes and belts ground to a halt, and a warning buzzer sounded somewhere in the distance.  But after a few tense moments, they realized that no one was coming and opened the heavy door with a quick button press.

Soft
blue lighting illuminated them as they stepped inside.  It was noticeably cooler and quieter.  It was a small control room, with dozens of screens monitoring the factory floor: displaying temperatures, parameter controls, errors, and automatic repairs that were underway.  A huge red warning screen highlighted the area of the Infernus line that was experiencing the problem.

“Look at this,” Celes said.  She pointed to another screen, on the opposite side of the room, by another door with the marking “Storage,” on the floor below it.  “There are factories all around the outside edge of the facility, and initial production started on 547-1-15… That’s over 50 years ago.  It was paused on…578-03-23, and resumed 58
6-03-23” 

Wouris glanced at another screen, “And if this production quota of 1500 Zeus rifles a day is accurate, that’s…” she did a quick calculation in her head, “…nearly 25 million Zeuses alone.”

The three looked at the second door simultaneously.

Janus opened the door hesitantly. For a moment, there was nothing but a wall of darkness beyond, and then huge lamps far above them
glowed faintly, slowly illuminating the jaw-dropping sight.  A vast sea of weapons and suits were stacked in rows hundreds high all within a gigantic underground warehouse.  Massive columns of scouts and fighters were lined up vertically in rows.  Janus peered over a rail, the room was impossibly tall.

“Incredible,” Wouris gasped, “There is enough armor and weapons here to supply the world’s largest army.  An army this big might have a shot at taking on all the other
Corporations.”

“Too bad it’s all useless without the actual army to go with it.”  Celes noted.

Wouris walked to a hanging fighter.  They were simple affairs, with one large engine in the back, a tiny cockpit, and its two wings swept forward.  The only noticeable marking was a single Phoenix emblem on the right side of the vehicle.  “These are Siren class fighters.  I haven’t seen one of these in years.  They are highly effective against other fighter craft.  Carry a lot of ordinance and have good speed, but they have almost no armor.  They disappeared when Phoenix fell because no other corporation could afford to produce so many throwaway fighters.”

“Throwaway?  What kind of general allows so many valuable fighters and pilots to be sacrificed?”  Janus asked.

“The Phoenix Executors did.  Phoenix was the largest, after all.”

Celes whistled, “It is amazing that they lost.”

“Not necessarily.  Sometimes you aren’t as strong as you think you are,” Wouris trailed off, glancing towards Janus.

“Come on, let’s finish looking around this place,” Celes encouraged.

They followed the catwalks to another production floor, this one feeding the storage room with Sirens.  This factory was cooler than the first; it just assembled the final components.  Passing the Sirens as they were built, Janus could see what Wouris meant by throwaway.  They were essentially engines with wings, designed for maximum payload with a minimum of anything else.

But nothing was more surprising to Janus than the very size of the underground facility.  Through the haze of cranes, assembly lines and metal, he could see the factory stretched further and further; it was designed to equip a massive army.  He commented on this to Wouris, “Celes raised a good point earlier.  What is the purpose of these weapons without an army to use it?”

“But Janus,” Celes interrupted, “Phoenix was destroyed; perhaps there was an army to use it before.”

“So how is the factory still running?  What is supplying its furnaces with materials?  Could Phoenix really have fielded such a huge army?”

Wouris shook her head, “I don’t know.  They may have had the citizens to fight, but every soldier you have in the field is one less working the fields.  The Corporations already have large standing armies compared to their populations.  I don’t think even Phoenix had the capability to pull more of it citizens as soldiers.  Besides, the other Corporations would quickly realize what was happening,” she swept a hand around at the factory, “The Corporations may not be able to see the production, but they would see the end results.  I don’t think Phoenix would be able to produce an army fast enough to use all this.”

“S
o,” Celes asked Janus’ unspoken question, “What was the point?”

Chapter 31: The White-Haired Man

The factory finally seemed to come to an end when they reached another heavy door marked “Cold Storage”.  Beyond the door lay another long passage, sloping downwards, ever deeper into the facility.  The air grew cooler until they finally reached a thick, heavily insulated door, again marked “Cold Storage”.  Janus prepped himself for a blast of cold air and opened the door.  A chill, misty wave washed over him, but not the one he expected. The space beyond had totally collapsed.  A huge Phoenix building had sunk deep into the ground and filled the area, its many floors creating layers of rock and dirt.  The cold mist that filled Phoenix seemed to be generated from the depths of Phoenix itself, rising up from the collapsed column to fill the ruins.  It was difficult to see in the thick fog, but only the outside ring of catwalks seemed to have survived, the rest of the massive space was crushed beneath the Phoenix superscraper.  The inside edge of the ring had been shorn off by the collapse, and the catwalk protested as Janus carefully placed his weight upon it. 

The t
hree ran their flashlights over the wall of earth before them, the light granting the fog a ghostly quality.  Faint gleams along the surface caught Celes’ eye, and Wouris crouched at the edge where the building slid into the cavern, disbelief upon her face.

“Immutium!  The area’
s laden with it.  It’s a literal treasure trove,” she breathed, her voice elated.  “It must have just filled this cavern before!  It isn’t a natural substance though, so I wonder what Phoenix was using it for?”  She scooped a handful of Immutium and dirt and put in one of her waist pockets.  “Maybe Chiles or Graham can give us an idea if we take a sample back.”

Janus nodded, “Well, when we get back to Valhalla, maybe we can send some forces to collect…”  He froze, voices were echoing from the mist in front of him.  He flicked his palm in an exaggerated movement so that Celes and W
ouris could see.  Peering over a rail to his left, he could just make out the shapes of two S.T.s below them, walking along a bridge beneath their platform.  Janus strained to hear them.

“Don’t know why we’re here…”

“Orders are orders: we just do what we’re told.  Who knows what the HAMs want with this place?”

Janus silently flipped over the rail, hanging by his legs to get a closer look at the soldiers. 

The first grunted, “Yeah.  High and mighty Executors can order us wherever – but I hate repair jobs.  These factories just won’t keep running, and I hate being sent out to the edges.  It takes forever to get out here with all the collapsed passages.”

“Just be glad we were out this far
already.  This is the short leg,” the second one interjected.

Janus squinted at the pair of S.T.s through the fog.  It was almost impossible to discern anything about the suits, but just before the pair disappeared completely into the mist, an emblem glinted in the light of the other’s headlamps.

Using his legs to flip himself back over the rail, he signaled to Celes and Wouris, giving them the all clear.  “Cerberus!”  Janus whispered excitedly.

“Well, I guess we’re not the first ones to find this place…”  Celes whispered back.

“Right, let’s see if we can find out what they want,” Wouris said.

“We should stick to hand signals now.  There’s no telling how many Cerberus soldiers are here, and I doubt they would be happy to see us if they found us.”  Celes whispered.

Janus and Wouris agreed.  They moved invisibly and swiftly along the dark catwalk.  It would take an exceptionally skilled, and very lucky, S.T. to realize anything lurked in the shadows. 

Narrow passages and twi
sted metal, often forced Janus, Celes, and Wouris to crawl and climb to move forward.  Beyond the catwalks, they found more doors, leading in all directions.  Janus opted for the one that descended deeper still, leaving the heavy mist and darkness for strange labs, or what was left of them:  Broken consoles, smashed machines with strange dials and tubes, and oozing vats filled with strange blue goo.

Electrogel.
  Janus signed.

Wouris signaled the pair with her hands.  (
These) labs (look like they were) destroyed (from the) inside.

Celes signaled with one hand in response. 
Bomb.

Wouris nodded.

Janus noted the damage only got worse as they moved deeper.  Some rooms were nothing more than blackened glass and twisted metal.  Whomever had destroyed the labs had known what they were doing and were thorough.

And then they heard
more voices – faint, but getting stronger.  Soon, they caught glimpses of men and women within some of the broken rooms.  And not all were armored S.T.s.  A few worked to salvage equipment from those labs that had received the least damage.  Others directed S.T.s to carry huge crates to and from some central location.

Danger.  S.T.s.  Two.  Right. 
Celes signaled.

Roger.  Move Left.
  Janus hand flashed quickly.  He watched the two S.T.s as they loaded an empty crate with materials scrounged by another.  With the crate close to overflowing with salvaged tubes, circuits, and parts, the S.T.s lifted the huge load and began trudging back from whence they came.

Celes switched from shorthand to the longer form
of signaling.  
Where (are) they going(?)

Wouris moved forward so that Janus and Celes could see her hands.  (
That’s what) we (are) going to find out.
             

It did not take long for them to reach their goal.  They stood on the highest level of a multileveled room, full of salvaged equipment, partially melted computer stations, and warped glass.  S.T.s, Inferni, and unarmored officers swarmed the room like ants. 

Janus, Celes and Wouris wisely pulled themselves back.  In one corner stood a
large stack of crates stamped with the Cerberus emblem, Janus signaled with a hand at them.  Black ash covered the floor, muffling the sound of their footsteps against the constant clunking of S.T. boots.  With a tiny lull in the S.T.s streaming in and out of the tunnels below, the three quickly made a move, crossing the short open space and retreating into the darkness of the highest corner of the room.  Janus could just barely make out a raised platform that jutted out on the ground floor.

An Infernus rushing across the open space caught his attention. 
“Lord Delacroix!”

A voice full of c
ontempt responded to the Infernus’ statement, “What, Infernus?”

“Three new shipments of Immutium have arrived from the Southern Cerberus facility as per your orders.  Overlord Middleton wishes that you know she sends her warmest regards to your operations.”

A man strode into view on the raised platform.  He wore black armor, layered with plates in a manner similar to ODIN Adept armor, but an attached cape gave him a more regal look.  Inlaid silver formed circular patterns along the corners of the cape, while broad epaulettes were covered with the white hair that flowed down to his shoulders and hid his face.  His posture demonstrated that he held himself above all others and expected unquestioning obedience.  He placed his hands on the railing of the platform, and stared at the officer from his position.  The fearsome looking Infernus took a step back.

Delacroix’s voice lightened slightly, as if he took pleasure in the officer’s reaction, but the underlying contempt was still present.  “Excellent.  Unload the Immutium into Section 3B.  Take the rest to the factory levels, Overlord Halifax will see to it there.”

“Sir, you don’t want the Immutium moved to Section 4D?  What about our delivery?”

Delacroix laughed, “Oh, I don’t think the
Mercs of ODIN will need the rest of their payment.”

“Yes, Great Executor,” the Infernus saluted, backed up several steps, and then hesitated, as if
he had something else to say.

Delacroix
seemed to notice, because he cocked his head and asked with an edge to his voice, “Is there something else?”

The Infernus officer stood up straight and said, “My Lord, Overlord Middleton regrets to inform you that all further shipments have been temporarily suspended due to some unwanted
attention from the SPARTAN Mercenary group.  The SPARTAN citadel has been seen North of Lightemann’s Ridge.”

Delacroix began to slowly descend the flight of stairs that connected the platform to the main floor, keeping his face down as he did so.  He stopped halfway and
stared at the Infernus.  “Tell Middleton,” he paused, “that she should put her affairs in order, and quickly, or she will answer to me.  Do you understand?  Now go.” The Infernus, who continued to back up as Delacroix had descended, saluted and shouted, “Yes, my Lord Executor!” and then turned and ran back into the tunnel, disappearing from view.

Executor Delacroix surveyed the bustling Cerberus S.T.s from his vantage point.  All seemed intent to avoid his gaze and sped by faster.  Even the flow of officers moving back and forth between the platform and the floor seemed to stop as if they were afraid to intrude upon him.

Placing his hands behind his back, Delacroix slowly descended the rest of the stairs to the main floor.  Janus struggled to get a look at his obscured face, fascinated by the dominance of the figure before him.

A uniformed, but unarmored man ran up to Delacroix and saluted, “Lord Delacroix.”

Delacroix tilted his head towards the man, and he quickly handed Delacroix a video transmitter saying, “Overlord Halifax wishes to speak with you, Executor.”  Delacroix nodded as the man hastily backed away, and then fled the scene.

“What is it, Halifax?”  Delacroix’s smooth voice said into the transmitter.

“Sir, belts 6, 10, and 14 have stopped working again.  I’ve sent men to repair the system, but it looks like, from preliminary reports, it will take some time to get them back up and running.”

Delacroix’s voice remained eerily calm.  “Halifax, I want those belts back on-line within the hour.”

“I don’t think that’s possible, Executor.  We are working with limited personnel and resources. The factory was never intended to be run at these levels.”

Delacroix’s voice rose suddenly, “Don’t tell me
how this factory is supposed to run!  I know what it’s supposed to produce!”  The workers in the room froze, looking for escape routes.  Delacroix glanced around and the workers immediately started working at double speed.  He calmed slightly.  “I need our production maxed, Halifax.  Every hour we lose is another opportunity for discovery and I have spent too long working on this to have it taken away!  I am already getting reports that Middleton is under increased scrutiny, and it has already taken too much time to get the facility back up and running to this point.  We cannot afford to wait.  What do you think will happen once we are discovered?”

“The factory will be fixed within the hour, Executor.”

“Good.”

Janus curiously watched Delacroix sigh and pick up a beaker that had been carelessly dropped upon the floor, yet had survived
its fall.  Delacroix was slowly turning the beaker over in his hands when another Security Trooper ran up.

“Executor!”

Delacroix looked up swiftly at the trooper.  “What?” he barked.

This trooper quailed under the eye of the Executor, and stuttered for a moment.  “Uh…sir, I mean, my Lord, uh… Our guards have just reported that Titan Security forces are sweeping the area above the bunker for a group of ODIN Mercenaries.”

Delacroix’s voice exploded, “What?”  All activity in the room stopped.

“What are you telling me for?  Seal up all the entrances!  We cannot be discovered here!”

“Of course, Lord Delacroix!”  The trooper quickly ran off.  A flurry of officers flew by the Executor and quickly directed the working S.T.s into action.  Celes touched Janus on the arm; he turned his head quickly, startled.

Time to go.
She signaled with two hands.

Janus nodded.  He looked back at the Executor, who now stood alone in the center of the room.  Delacroix took one last look around the lab, and then hurled the glass beaker into the wall and uttered a howl of rage.