SANITY LINE

I. Interregnum

 

                Hell, if labels didn’t lie, was nothing like what Niles Clayton or most the rest of the Grey Angels who were now visiting the Infernal City expected. Granted, they were several days in and yet to see a sunrise, and spent most of their days indoors, but even when taking in the fresh air, the temperature was neither oppressively hot nor destructively cold.

 

                Still, it was clear the Infernal City was no place on earth. In addition to the perpetual darkness, the vastness of the city and the stillness of the air didn’t fit. Such a place as this could not have existed with such secrecy in this age of near omnipresent surveillance – eyes in the stars at every hour of the day mapped out the surface of the planet with such precision, some said, they could identify what article in the newspaper you were reading as you sipped your coffee on the terrace.

 

                No, instead of fire and brimstone, there was only the vast glass and steel palace, a city as old or older than time, with plush lobbies of every era of fashionable earthly architecture. Granted, their host lived in what Scion had explained was the wealthy and secure district of the Devil Quarter – a place where the law of the land was held paramount and mortals and Infernals could mingle.

 

                Their host, who was now entering the boardroom where they had all gathered, was a rarity. Until recently, those versed in the Infernal City and their denizens would have called this man an impossibility. Aaron Cluny was a tiefling – born of a immortal and an infernal. The mix of heritage was so unique that experts (such as Scion seemed to be) were unprepared to predict on the extent to which a tiefling would resemble – in ability or biology – either parent.

 

                The young man – and young he was – cut the figure you might expect out of a young man who managed to work his way up to a position of corporate leadership. He found himself suddenly in charge of Magnussun Arms after the parent company, Slipher Corporation, collapsed. Shortly afterward, he moved the corporate headquarters here. A curious move, but one that had turned to the advantage of the Grey Angels, who would likely have been aerosolized along with most the rest of the Kraterburg Metropolitan Area during the battle over the same city.

 

                Aaron unbuttoned his jacket as he sat down. The motion was fluid and practiced and, as always, Niles still could not tell if the man was concealing a weapon behind his jacket or not, as he sat down. “Thank you all for coming.”

 

                A general chorus of reflexive greetings filtered around the room. Niles sipped from his coffee and was once again annoyed to find it was neither in a paper cup nor had the flavor and consistency of engine oil – he actually liked cheap coffee. Aaron continued. “Today marks one week before your Immigration and Refugee Department red cards expire. As promised, I have prepared a brief on the present situation in your homeland, in the hopes that you can at least make an educated decision about your return.”

 

                Niles smirked slightly off the far side of his mouth, casting a sidelong glance to banker, whose lipan features were impassible as always as the slightly younger man consulted his copy of the brief. Aaron had been quietly – but not subtly – pushing an effort to hire each and every one of them to work for him here. It was a bid Niles had no interest in.

                “Let me give you the short version. Kraterburg and everything else within 300 kilometres of the blast epicenter is gone and flooded, with the lone exception of a fourty-square-kilometre island in the middle of the new bay.”

                Prodigal had been looking at the map. “… Would’ve been part of the Figaro district.”

 

                “Yes. The College of Judges is understandably in tatters. Someone had the good sense to activate the continuity of government plan before the blast.” Aaron shrugged. “Personally, that makes me think the government was responsible. The Executive Council declared martial law with four of the six original members, and now rule from Tererra. Jury Selection has been declared. Nobody’s investing much money in running for a seat, though.”

                “Well, you wouldn’t think there would be,” Scion said slowly.

 

                If the government really had been involved…

                Scion looked to Niles, who felt the man’s voice bubbling up at the back of his mind. It’s more likely that Aaron is simply playing us.

 

                “Communications must be a mess.”

                “Communications is the least of your concerns. Infrastructure damage is massive and sustained. Half of Enotekka and Zvanesburg Port have been wiped out by seismic shock from the blast. The northern Terrwald was still burning yesterday, and the fire started 83 days ago. The average daily high temperature since the blast has been eleven degrees Celsius.”

 

                Banker frowned. “It’s midsummer.”

 

                “We carved a bowl out of two-hundred eighty thousand square kilometers of earth and put most of that material into the sky,” Niles said, matter-of-factly. “We had might as well call ourselves dinosaurs.”

 

                “Life finds a way,” Aaron said calmly, piqued. “… Did you just calculate the area of a circle in your head?”

 

                “Two significant digits is hardly a calculation,” Niles said, waving a hand dismissively. “No roads, no communications, fuck all for crops the rest of the year, and probably a minimal harvest next year. Do we at least know what caused the blast?”

                “No. Radiation was significantly elevated in one area of the new bay, but the area coincides with a former nuclear power plant, and the measurements are inconsistent with a radiological weapon. I’m prepared to consider more exotic possibilities.”

              

  “Food, Roads, Phones.” Prodigal echoed, looking to Niles. “That’s a government gone. Executive Council and the Defense Forces can prognosticate all they like, but they aren’t going to rule much a year or two from now.”

               

“If I was overly concerned about the College of Judges’ edicts,” Banker interjected, “I would still be with the Air Self Defense Force.”

 

                Niles considered for a while. “… The four of us are in agreement on one thing, right? We are going back?”

 

                The men in this room – less Aaron – comprised the leadership of the Grey Angels – the “Four Horsemen” thus named in Archangel’s instructions for his own version of continuity of government. Each, in turn, glanced at another, before Scion finally nodded. “Yes. It’s more a question of where to go back to, and what to do when we get there."

                Banker nodded. “Zaxton is a lost cause. But the Archipelago itself… there are still people there. We could go to Enotekka in force, and establish our own government there, and eventually salvage the whole ball of wax.”

                Prodigal rose a manicured eyebrow. “Or, instead of chasing after the pipe-dream of the Lipan ever ruling the whole Archipelago again – no offense – we could go to Galba Dea.”

                “Galba Dea doesn’t have anything like the kind of infrastructure it would take to rule over the whole archipelago…”

                “They do have a functioning government, though. Existing law, order, and human services.” Prodigal looked to Niles. “The threat we united to fight is gone. There’s no reason to continue in the manner we have been.”

                The idea had some appeal to the detective, who, try as he might, could not yet get used to living with a foot on either side of the great fence of legality. “No. We’d be better off in Figaro.”

                Scion perked. “Figaro?”

                “It’s where the damage is worst. The islands are ruined. Geography itself has changed. There’s so many wounds in our world that we have no choice but to triage.” Niles tapped the map. “What could be better for that broken place than a sudden infusion of civilization?”

                “You mean law and order,” Aaron said softly.

                “The hallmark by which cultures can be judged to be civil or not,” Niles countered.

                Scion nodded. “I agree. I was going to suggest the same.”

 

                Banker was looking thoughtful. “… We stand to lose everything, going there.”

                “We stand to gain everything,” Scion said, “for those who have nothing to lose. We will go to Figaro.”

 

---

 

                You let one person take a little bit of authority over their own actions, and the whole world goes to hell in a handcart.

 

                It was one of those contingencies that you never expected to actually use, like the bottled water most people keep in the trunk of their cars on a national scale, but Agency Division actually had a plan for dealing with precisely the disaster that had befallen Kraterburg. Granted, the subsidence of a large portion of the Mainland and the subsequent flooding hadn’t been a part of it. Neither had the accidental death of the Agent-Liaison in the initial blast, or the death of Commissioner Beckett of the National Police Force.

 

                Still, those events themselves had contingencies, even taken together with the larger problems of a loss of communications for most of the population, large swaths of blacked out infrastructure, and a run on the grocers with the next harvests and shipments of relief being god-knew how long away. Agency could continue to govern even if the College of Judges could or would not.

 

                That eventuality, thankfully, had yet to be reached. The skies, at least, Agency DID rule. Even the Air Self Defense Forces were unwilling to fly in these conditions – save for the most essential of missions. There was nothing at all in the air to bother the Avrotec XV-11 “Musta” Covert Hybrid Transport. The black tiltrotor – often mistaken for a helicopter during hovering flight – was a mainstay of Agency operations – deadly quiet at most ranges, extremely small radar cross-section when it wants one, and generally hardy for a tiltrotor.

 

                “That’s got to be it, wouldn’t you say, ma’am?”

 

                Ma’am, the sole non-Enforcement passenger out of the dozen or so in the back of the aircraft, glanced out the window indicated. A column of smoke was rising from a spot halfway up the slope of the Northern Spine Mountains. Against the backs of aviator-style sunglasses, an Augmented Reality Interface overlaid a wide strip of land denoting the most probable flight path of the object Aerospace Tracking and Intercept had picked up. The fire was smack in the centre of the path.

 

                “Oh,” she said evenly, picking up a white jacket to put on over her similarly-coloured suit. “I’d say it probably is."
 

---

 

                Duke Valarian Sussex was a man on a mission, and that mission had a name – a good night’s rest. It was an opportunity few men in his position were afforded, but for today, he thought – today, he could be allowed that one small comfort, perhaps.

 

                Styled correctly, Prince Valarian of the House of Sussex, Duke of Sussex, could be forgiven for craving sleep so badly. The high relative precedence of his duchy (Sussex) and his rank of Prince signified his position of Crown Prince, and Crown Prince Valarian found himself as a monarch-in-waiting, in the interregnum of an absolute monarchy, that of Galba Dea.

 

                He set the customary black mourning-clothes aside to be laundered and changed hurriedly into nightclothes, the plain (frankly cheap) red-and-gold handle of a toothbrush still clenched between his teeth, and the ringing of the church bells still pounding away in his ears. His Father had been an older man, and had died of a condition long known to have been the death of him. The death was not the shock.

 

                It was the sheer amount of time his waking life now consumed – time needed elsewhere, given how busy his dreaming life itself could be. Valarian was a man of peculiarly vivid and coherent dreams – dreams that lingered with him for hours after waking, at times. He took no special note of his dreams, but their vividness and coherency made them as tiring as waking, and for nearly a decade now he felt as though he was in a state of constant fatigue, as tired as any man might be after living two lives.

 

                As he had requested some hours earlier, when he first contemplated retiring to bed, a teapot full of hot water had been delivered to his room. The tea itself – a curious herbal blend he’d just acquired earlier in the day from an old friend – was in his pocket, and as it steeped, he could feel the steam itself pervading him, and giving reality that curious, slow-moving texture of dreams.

 

                He drank it quickly with a little lemon, as was his custom, and not ten minutes hence he could be found safely parceled in his bed, resting comfortably.

 

---

 

                “Figaro’s the right choice.”

 

                Most people, when confronted in their sleep with something impossible, would either accept it as perfectly normal without realizing it, or jerk immediately awake. Dreams, it seems, do not like being called out on their falsehoods. Every now and then, though, someone tired enough, or wise enough, can have that lucid moment without waking up at all.

 

                Niles was having one such moment, finally having a proper cup of coffee at a diner he was just now realizing no longer existed, given Kraterburg’s destruction. It was a hot summer day – hot enough he’d folded his coat behind him on the chair and rolled up his sleeves, in spite of the way open carrying a revolver on an underarm harness (something he rarely did, preferring to draw from the hip) tended to make people nervous. In fact, in many ways, this dream – the coffee as a destination rather than something to keep his hands busy while he did something else, the wrong holster, the wrong habits – struck him as someone else’s dream.

 

                But then, we often dream about things outside our own experience.

 

                Eli Sharona eased into the seat opposite him. Niles saw the man in his dream as he had done in life – over-fatigued, roadwarn, and badly tanned by too much sun. The quasi-repentant murderor, or vigilante necromancer, or whatever the hell he had been before Archangel had met his demise in Kraterburg. He smiled, belatedly, as though only just now sure he’d found the right person.

 

                “With you telling me that,” Niles said (to himself, ultimately, he supposed), “I have to wonder if I should have gone with some other idea.”

                Eli chuckled. “Maybe. But you wouldn’t have followed me if you didn’t have some tiny speck of faith in me bottled up inside you somewhere.”

                “Maybe I just owed you one.”

                “You’ve never set your ethics aside for debts before.”

 

                That much, at least, was true, and Niles tried to think what his dream was telling him. “… You’re not real. This is an unreal conversation.”

                “Maybe,” Eli said, “but Figaro’s still the right choice.”

 

                Niles sat upright in his bunk so quickly that he struck his forehead on the bunk above. For a moment, hissing through his nose, he lay there, then, calmly, groped for the alarm he knew was somewhere “above” his head.

 

                A text message waited on the screen of his phone – a loaner that was made specifically for working in the Infernal City. “Offer still stands.”

 

---

 

                “Ah. Good evening, Ma’am.”

 

                Didn’t we just leave this party?

 

                The Woman in White reached up to sweep her tinted glasses off her face, having no further use for the Augmented Reality interface now that she’d reached her destination. She looked up at the Immersive Attenuation Tank on the platform at the far side of the Transatmospheric Medical Centre. The tank was used, her briefing notes had told her, to treat certain classes of chronic and acute problems caused by those returning from operations in space.

 

                The sight of the blonde man inside the tank simply floating there, eyes moving visibly behind closed lids, had given her the most unmistakable sense of déjà vu she’d experienced in a long and prominent career. Well, as prominent as these things could get, anyway.

 

                She realized the technician was still looking at her, and belatedly snapped out of it, bringing her paper cup of strong oolong tea to her lips before greeting him. “Evening. This is our man?”

                “As close to it as we’re ever likely to get. Project Moses II Specimen 001: Vidcund Därk. Last known posting: Special Director, Task Force Creena. It’s genetically confirmed.”

 

                She replaced her glasses as the man handed her an autofile. “… Mild genetic deviation due to exposure to radiation typical in Low Earth Orbit. You’re screening him for cancer?”

                “Among other things. It will be some time before he can survive outside of that tank, as well. His skeletal structure is severely atrophied – normal for sustained exposure to freefall.” The technician sounded judgmental. “How long did you have him up there?”

 

                The Woman in White had stepped up to the platform, and, again forcing herself to pay attention to the conversation at hand, thought about it for a moment. “Long enough, anyway. What brought him back down?”

                “The report I have from ATI suggests it was a freak accident. Collision of his orbital capsule with space debris. It’s rare, considering how well-plotted Stasis Orbits are… but it does happen.”

 

                The technician approached her, taking a reading off the tank with some sort of handheld meter. “This guy was someone important?”

                “… Just the key witness to the end of the world.”