The Two Fangs

Chapter 14

"She's in the bubble," Valle whispered, gesturing to the sky.

Grid groaned at a dangerous volume, but gestured for Valle to lead the way.

The halls were curiously quiet, even for late night. Several times they heard voices and flattened against a wall, but the speaker never came into view.

"She's helping us," Grid insisted. She gripped Valle's hand tightly, unaware that her talons bit into it. "She sees us and she's keeping them away."

Valle didn't want to encourage her to think that way, but he didn't have another explanation, not on hand. He squeezed back, but the look he gave her was grim.

He didn't try to tell her he saw little chance that she would come back down the umbilical once they entered it. She knew it. It was what she had planned for all this time.

"This is Osah," Grid mused sourly, as they ascended through the infinite void. "The vengeful god everyone is terrified of is just an office building."

"He isn't any of that," Valle muttered. "He's a committee that's had thousands of members in five hundred years, and there's nothing vengeful about what He does. It's entirely practical."

Grid studied him, and clicked her beak.

"Everything about it makes it worse. When did they tell you? When they first took you?"

"They left us to figure it out. I thought they were training us to be zealots, for a while. When I learned about Veritas, that they were the Vampires, I thought that was true. But they aren't, either. Osah doesn't recruit them for fanaticism, it's because they're cruel, and they'll do what they're told."

"But you wouldn't."

Valle watched particles drifting by outside, lit by the ring of lights around the elevator's handlebar.

"I would've," he said. "It would always have been one of us, it just would've been different."

"I don't see it."

Grid readied her springgun when the elevator reached the bubble, but the antechamber the door opened onto was empty. It was a small, metal room with pipes intruding from outside, frosted white, and the only door opened with a bio scan. Valle stepped up to it, and it opened.

There was no one who could have infiltrated the complex except for Valle. What trust the OSA put in Crucis, to keep him under control.

There was no way to know the size of the entire bubble, but the room into which they entered was huge. A disc maybe two hundred yards across, walkways radiating from the central tower into which the umbilical opened. There were touchscreens at intervals along the catwalks, but everything else was cooling equipment. Arrays of enormous fans blew from above and below, while huge pistons worked inbetween the catwalks to keep the coolant flowing.

Stepping out from the antechamber was only bearable after an hour in the cold umbilical. The wind flattened fur and feathers against flesh, the metal, a finger's width deep in some places with accumulated frost, gripped at hands and feet. Thankfully the inhospitable environment meant that there were no living guards, though maintenance drones patrolled, undisturbed by the wind.

Clutching the railing, they inched out to the nearest screen. As soon as Valle came near, it lit up with the orange pumpkin icon.

Of the options it gave him, he didn't dare adjust the cooling fans, nor would he risk requesting any kind of report. He searched for a diagram, a list of names, anything. Lacking those, he pressed maintenance access and vent cores.