Legacy: Beyond the Veil

The underground

"Keep it moving." Rosa said, giving him another shove from behind. Noah had to grab on to one of the walls to not fall over, but did as she said.

Rosa had taken him underground, although that in itself didn't mean much. The station hall had itself been underground as well. Still, there was a way in which the wide open and well-lit hall screamed "above ground" while the dark and cramped tunnels that ran underneath it convinced his brain that they were now "under ground."
Of the two, Noah definitively preferred the latter.
His eyes had quickly adjusted to the dim environment, and now that his surroundings were made up of neatly organized tunnels and passageways he found that he could more easily keep his bearings. A result of spending most of his life in environments such as these.

Of course, his relief of being in a more familiar environment was only slightly ruined by the weight of Rosa's hand on his shoulders. She didn't drag or push him, the hand was simply a reminder that she was in control. He needed no reminder that she was armed, too.
"This way." She said, then guided him into another branching corridor, the tightest one yet. After a few meters, the tunnel was narrow enough that even he could barely spread both arms without touching both walls.

A simple sliding door barred the entrance: it was of standard subterranean design: Interlocking parts of sheet metal containing thermal foams, set into rails that would collapse it against the wall instead of sliding into it in order to preserve space. Warning emblems had been burned into the door's metal surface, and though the colors used to paint them over had almost faded their message was still crystal clear: "Warning: Confined space." The text read, further punctuated by the icon for asphyxiation. Rosa walked up to the door's control panel and punched in a code on the numpad. A claxon blared and the door flashed a blue light, indicating that the air beyond was safe.
Despite the system's assurance, both Noah and Rosa brought their workskin's rebreathers to their faces before the doors cycled open. It was a reflex bred into both of them, too many early Sindrionites had died to false all-clear signals for their descendants to repeat those mistakes. Air masks pressed to their faces, Noah and his captor entered the hallway, only lowering their rebreathers when their workskins had run an independent test of the air quality and confirmed that it was, in fact, safe to breathe.
The hallway carried on for maybe fifty meters or so, only lit by two out-of-date diode lights. The further one of the two lights even flickered out for a moment every few seconds. It reminded Noah of an insect's death twitches. A single fan system stood in the center, lazily sucking air in and pumping new air out. The low whine the ventilation produced led Noah to believe this room had not seen much maintenance.

The passage was some kind of fire-suppression storage, from the looks of it. Both walls were lined with rows of CO2-bottles that ran deep into the structure. The bottles were connected to several high-pressure lines that ran through the passageway's ceiling and under the grated floor. If even a single one of those bottles started leaking, the room would probably not be safe to enter without rebreathers for at least a few hours, judging by the state of the fan system.

With how narrow the tunnel was, they were forced to walk single-file. Noah was in front, Rosa right behind him. She still kept her hand between his shoulder blades in a way that fell somewhere between guidance and a threat. Noah's heart was throbbing so hard he was fairly certain Rosa could feel it with her hand, and if not she could surely hear it. They were an awful long way from other people by now, only those with express purposes ever came down here. It left him wondering what Rosa was planning.

She grabbed him by his collar at almost the same time that he saw that the door on the opposite side of the passageway was welded shut and he felt his blood turn to ice in his veins: It was a dead end. A room no-one had reason to visit except for monthly inspections, no one close enough to hear him, and an armed woman right behind him.
"Stay here." She said calmly. "That door goes nowhere."
Noah swallowed, feeling how his throat went dry. Was she going to kill him, after all?.