Moe Lane

It’s the little things.

Norm had been expecting another long walk, but this passageway was much shorter. And soon, wider. Also, it had… well. They were cages, set in the wall, and there was no getting around it. Twenty on a side, big enough for a man, and thankfully empty of anything, either living or dead. But they smelled. They smelled so rank, Norm wondered why the stink hadn’t reached as far as the antechamber behind them.

There were also lights in here; modern ones, that could glow indefinitely. They pushed back the gloom far enough that the two could see that they were now in a large, rectangular room, with another, formidable door on the other side. The room itself was all concrete walls and floors, with large drains in the floor and more of that rank smell. 

It all looked horribly… familiar. “I didn’t think the seccys went in for mental readjustment centers,” Ashelyn said with obviously false bravado. “All the reports said they just stripped their weakest reeds naked, and sent them out to die in the cold.”

“They were guerrillas,” Norm pointed out, distantly wondering if this room had anything that was flammable. Burning down a Peep internal security facility had been one of his life goals ever since two weeks into his original conscription. “They wouldn’t have had the time or the space to break down and re-educate their problem recruits. I guess here they had both. Check the cabinets?”

So, all the books that might have told them what a bad idea this was were… sequestered. Old Man Lewis’s, ah, irregular Presidency had a history of similar bad policies.

FSB heavy gear smelled ridiculously good. And it wasn’t because the stuff was new, either. The kit he had signed out from the supply shack had clearly seen some use. There just wasn’t any of the faint reek of socks, sweat, and seared blood Peep body armor always seemed to have, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

It had been easy to get, too. He and Ashelyn had just signed in, selected standard riot collection kits, and been automatically issued them. The only restriction there was ‘no gun you’re not qualified on,’ which was why Norm had a punch-gun and Ashelyn was carrying just a carbine. It really wasn’t like the old days at all. In fact… the Old Man would be having a fit right now, he mused, and even now it was an effort not to wash the no-longer-forbidden thought away before it showed up on his face.

Nobody stopped them in the passageway, either. In fact, nobody was in the passageway, which was a stroke of careful luck. The video feeds had shown that the grotto cleanup was happening during regular hours, so the best time to sneak around in an underground passage built by violent fanatics would clearly be in the dead of night.

Ashelyn had laughed when Norm pointed that out.