Meteora

by Nicolas-Gagnon

What happens when Man allows himself to be soothed by the warm embrace of Progress and Technology? What happens when the quasi cult of the divinity of modern humanity gets out of control?

METEORA

METEORA

The history of the sword is the history of humanity

-Richard Burton

Law, without force, is impotent.

-Blaise Pascal

When the sun crests the hills for you, but you can't see it, when spring goes out of its way to tickle your senses, but you can't smell it, when the birds soar high above your head to twitter a song of freedom, but you can't hear it, then you'll know that you have been beat. But do not question for whom the bell of liberty will ring, for the bell will toll for thee.

For all of those who seek freedom from the yoke of a tyrant, this is for you.

Credo awoke in his sleeping quarters with a startle, the strident beeping of the intercom systems somewhat attenuated by the dark woolen blankets thrown over his head. It was just a dream, he told himself, simply a series of nervous impulses. He hopped down from his bunk, the cold ceramic tiles numbing his bare feet. Lumbering up, stretching his arms and legs to loosen the stiffened joints, Credo followed his morning routine, which started with a round of exercises, a routine he'd follow tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, a routine shared by the other ten million other citizens of Asyle. For was this not the way to live? Of course it was.

Credo's eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the sudden change of light, reflected tenfold by the stark, impossibly white walls of Living Complex number 14. He grabbed his pale gray tunic laid out by his bunk, no doubt placed there by the Night Crew while he was still slumbering. Throwing it over his shoulders, he threw periodical nervous glances at the intercom fixed into the patch of wall overlooking his bed. The crackling messages would be delivered by those who answered directly to Father, and Father did not like to be kept waiting. Credo was an Asylian citizen, after all.

Asyle was built a few years after the chaos created by the Great Divide, a massive schism itself caused by the Coming of the Clouds. Drilled into a massive bed of granite, Asyle would not budge, whether by earthquakes, storms or floods. Huge concrete pillars had literally screwed Asyle onto a rich deposit of iron and cobalt, metals that were even today extracted by the Mining Crew.

The city was built to optimize efficiency. Two wide boulevards crossed each other in the center of the bustling metropolis, busy drones hurrying to bring their masters to their place of need. Surrounding the city walls was the Outer Circle, a no-man's land which the Undesirables had claimed as their own. The Asylians tolerated their wretched presence, as long as they did not interfere with external operations.

The Undesirables, commoners by birth and by deed, abounded in the Asylian region, a festering sore on the stark white face of God's own people, for only fair-blooded Asylians would enter the promised afterlife. One could not simply "become" a citizen, one had to be born one. Mere hours after birth in the Nursing Complex, Asylian children would be confirmed as Citizens, born to rule, born to conquer.

Every Citizen answered directly to a Master, who took orders from a Prior, who spoke directly to Father, last living descendant of the original pioneers of Asyle. The priors, the very voices of Father, were the ones who worried about everything, from justice to food to laws.

Credo strode out of the front door of the Complex, taking in the warm morning sun. It was never cold in Asyle, for cold would hamper crop results. The booming voice of Father, along with the confidently smirking face of the old patriarch, welcomed every Asylian citizen to a fine morning of God's Year 2247. Praise be to God, the voice resonated, a call which was echoed by several million voices. Aye, praise be to God.

The Engineering complex was glowing white, gleaming brightly under dawn's rays. On his way, Credo saw a Cleaner, quite a rare sight during the day. Decked in a full-length black cloak and hood, the figure had seven stars stitched to its shoulder pads. In front of him, a bedraggled man, obviously Undesirable by the rags that covered his gaunt frame, was being prodded forward by a painful jolt from the Cleaner's electrified wand. The man, so pitiful was he with the skin hanging from his bones, had undoubtedly committed a misdemeanor, petty theft or probably simply sullying the city's image by setting foot within its walls. Praise be to the Cleaner for removing the scum off of the streets, Credo thought. He would probably be escorted to the Palace of Justice, be subject to a speedy trial, and then disposed of. The Undesirable should be grateful, really, living such a wretched existence stung Credo to the very pit of his soul. He should be glad to be removed.

A few feet short of the complex doors, Credo halted to observe the bustling activity of the neighboring lot. This year's novice Building crew was erecting a new Living Complex. Their head, a shrewd-looking young man of about twenty years of age, was scrutinizing his plans, wide sheets of paper printed with tiny blue characters, while barking out orders at his workers. An enormous beam of galvanized steel was being raised by the men on the roof, all of them anchored on the metal surface with magnetized boots. The beam, veritable pillar of steel, was fastened to the pulley system with a number of looping chains and magnets.

The next few seconds seemed to happen at half the speed. The enormous strain on the chains was too high, the loops twisting and bending following the swing of the payload. One of them, fully three inches thick, snapped at mid-link, the chain whipping at its full length into the air, whistling as it creased the stone of the wall it smacked into. The support beam, no longer stable, ripped off from its magnetic supports, plummeting to the ground, two hundred tons of metallic death, taking the scaffolds and the pulleys with it. The roofers, anchored as they were, had the good sense to let go of their cables as soon as they had seen the master chain snap. One Builder on the ground was not so lucky. A deafening crash accompanied the earth-shattering impact of the girder, blasting through several feet of concrete-layered pavement.

It was only after the dust had settled that Credo could truly see the damage inflicted. The beam had broken through several pipelines, water gushing from the ground at tremendous output, flooding the scene of the accident. The Builder, having jumped out of harm's way, had saved his own life, but not completely. The support beam had struck his legs on its downward course, shearing off the appendages at the knees. Pale white bone gleamed grimly in the morning sun, spattered with deep, crimson blood, swirling in the shallow water.

The head Builder rushed over to the downed worker, yelling at a few of his comrades to support the ghastly figure. Rummaging awhile in his trousers, he produced a pale beige syringe, installed in a plastic cartridge loader. Setting the circular reticule on the exposed thigh, he squeezed the trigger, smiling with grim satisfaction as the silver needle plunged into the warm flesh to stab into the artery to pump fifty grams of concentrated congealing agent.

Suddenly, the flow of the man's lifeblood slowed to a halt, the pasty white face of the worker relaxing. Credo, from his position on the doorstep a few meters away, reached for the communication unit his pocket and dialed the number for an emergency medial crew. Having done his civic duty, he flashed his identification card to the laser-activated lock and stepped inside his work station.

Glowing fluorescent lighting tubes lined the otherwise empty halls , throwing a spectral glow to illuminate the hundreds of Engineers, bent over hundreds of desks, scratching letters and numbers on blank sheets of paper. Credo strode over towards the desk that sported the plate "Unite 2B-831", pulled up his molded plastic stool and declared in a neutral tone:

"Viewscreen, on."

A pale green screen, projected from a lens on his desk, materialized, slightly crackling from the highly ionized air. Credo lightly tapped the square labeled "current projects", scrolled down to the current date and selected "Project 84-J". Asyle was becoming crowded the population having crowned the ten million mark last year. The Birthing Wards had been issued quotas, defended from issuing more than a thousand infants to families per month. The Council had commissioned a new Living Complex to be erected, just a short distance outside of the protective enclave formed by the Asylian walls. Blueprints had been drawn, precise measurements scrawled next to obscure lines and squiggles. Credo moved a bony finger down the scroll bar, spotting what he'd been looking for.

"Materials required, workforce detail," declared a cool female voice.

Credo waited a few seconds as the screen blinked and re-initialized, phasing in and out of existence. Selecting the workforce detail list, he cycled through the endless collection of unit designations, tapping the picture of the desired person. Punching in the command, he unchecked the "available" box next to the picture of a certain recently injured Builder, effectively deleting any and all data of this person ever having been born. The medical unit will have to process him through, he made a mental note of.

Suddenly, a small green light flared to life on the corner of his viewscreen. Dispatch warning…

"Engineer 2B-831, you are requested for a hearing. Report to your appointed unit supervisor and await further instructions."

Strange, Credo thought, my work has been adequate and up to date. What had I done wrong? Puzzled, the man got up, pushed his chair back in, and briskly made his way to office number 12-G, Foreman Matthias's office.

As soon as he set foot on the pressure-controlled pad, the stainless steel sliding door gave way, inviting him in. The foreman's office was compact, busy and rather plain, yet gave the impression to be in a much larger room. A single sheet of glass, curving gracefully, embracing the contours of the office, gave a full view of the daily hectic life of the booming center of Asyle. The city itself was not enormous, but its beauty resided within the remarkably efficient use of space. Still basking in the twilight of the early morning, the ordinarily white walls appeared pale pink, much like the dainty flesh of the salmon bred in the Distribution centers. Different districts awoke at different times, but all of them were ready and alert by the eighth hour. Far off in the distance, still shrouded by a veil of thin mist stood the Cathedral. Home to Father and his entourage, the Cathedral had been the first building constructed in Asyle, so the databanks showed. Capped with steel bulbs on the roofs of its many minarets, she was an imposing sight indeed.

Credo awoke from his reverie by a subtle, polite, yet slightly exasperated cough from the back of the room. Seated at the very edge of the polymer desk was the Foreman, a smallish, fair-skinned man who was getting on in years. Having caught Credo's attention, his fingers ceased their dance-like pattern of tips and taps on the workscreen and sat on the man's lap, tightly clenched together.

"Greetings, and well met, Engineer 2B-831," he began, in a quavering voice, more akin to a squeak than to normal speech. "The Council has made clear their plans to establish Living Complex number 41, but due to demographic and geological impossibilities, a new patch has been delimited of the outskirts of Asylian walls. Accordingly, such a patch has never been recorded in municipal databanks. After a lengthy examination, the Council has selected you to be such a recorder. Your excellent track record shows that you are most capable, despite the…delicate…matter of your consort two years ago."

Credo winced at the not-so-subtle jibe aimed at him. His wife had been processed for being in clear violation of Section II of the Code. She had communicated with an Undesirable and of course, shamed her husband in the process.

"You are to report to Central Gatehouse 3 tomorrow. Your equipment will be assigned to you there. You will map the region, take every measurement, imagery and geological formation of the general area. Encrypt the information and submit it to Central Databank. I need not tell you that this assignment is of capital importance. Dismissed."

Grabbing a nondescript magnetized card from his desk, he inserted it into the drive of his viewscreen, loading any and all permissions needed for the commission, finally flicking it in Credo's slightly trembling hands. And just like that, he charged one of the lowest-graded Engineers with one of the most important duties.

After a series of repeated bows and handshakes, Credo walked away from the office, knees wobbling, shaking like a leaf. Should he complete the task with adequate results, he'd be propelled through the strict hierarchy of the Engineer ranking system. Become a Foreman, perhaps more?

Minutes turned to hours as time melted away. The monotonous desk work, filing reports, finding flaws in building design, work that he had been subjected to since as early as he could remember was about to make was for new duties, more opportunities to serve.

The last few hours had been a blur. Credo mentally chided himself for the undoubtedly poor quality of the day's work. The walk from the workplace district to Living Complex fourteen had been uneventful, as always. Oh well, he'd redeem himself with this one, he pondered as he entered the five-digit entry code. The touchpad bleeped in recognition and swung the door open to Credo's residence. His ears picked up the buzz of a voice. Someone was already here.

The blond-haired boy's head swiveled to welcome the new arrival. Seated in the only chair of the recreation room, the boy's bright blue eyes gleamed dully in acknowledgement, then went back to intensively peruse the newscom screen.

"Hello Derek," timidly said Credo after a few awkward moments.

"Greetings Papa, how was your day?", came back the expected response.

"Quite well, very satisfying. The Council has given me an important assignment. I'll be absent by the time you stir from your slumber tomorrow."

"The Council? Splendid! Congratulations Papa."

"Thank you."

And that was it. Idle conversation was not productive.

"Papa," came a surprisingly blunt question, "why does God allow them to live?"

The holographic screen of the newscom was the only source of the light in the room. Images of a short line of bedraggled individuals filing by, rags hanging off of their emaciated figures, locks of hair matted down with dirt, eyes set into gaunt faces, were the main highlight of today's news. A nest of Undesirables had been cleansed from their hiding spot in a corner of the city.

"I do not know Derek, I truly don't know."

Piqued with outrage, the child went on:

"But…Father does not approve of them, but he is sending them to a better place still! Why?"

"Father is a man of incredible altruism, Derek. He does everything he can so that we may live in peace. Everything. If this means sending a few of those people away, then so be it."

Derek resumed his quiet staring of the screen. In but a few years, he would achieve passage from his learning age to his training, transferring from the General Academy to the institute best suited to his aptitudes, to become a functioning member of Asylian society.

The images now showed the men and women being prodded into transporters, transporters, the text showed, which would ferry them to the Palace of Justice where, by the grace of God and Father, they would be sentenced to the punishment that fits their heinous crimes.

So be it.

Having risen a full four hours before his appointed time, Credo rubbed the sleep from his eyes and reported to Gatehouse 3. The Gatekeeper had been waiting for him, and had his gear ready and inspected. Credo nodded his thanks and boarded the mobile platform that was hovering a few inches from the ground. He had two miles to travel, might has well make them easier.

Swiping his permission card through the platform port, he punched in the desired coordinates, gripping the safety bar so tightly his knuckled had turned white. He passed the dim strobe lights that delimited Asylian territory, finally arriving at a barren patch of dirt that a lonely pair of beacons announced.

Fueled with the energy of pride, Credo leaped off of the platform, swooping with a swing of his arm his duffel sack of equipment landing surprisingly hard on the pebble-strewn ground. Now then, Credo told himself, time to work.

Demagnetizing the lock strip on his bag with a swipe of his card, he pulled out an odd-looking contrivance and set it on a telescopic pole he had unfolded. Temperature stable, he noted, flipping on a small switch on the device. A thin red beam emerged from a tiny, glass-covered hole in the front, shooting from one beacon to the other. One thousand five hundred meters of length by one thousand meters of width…Credo entered these numbers on the touchscreen presented to him. Geological formation…Credo pulled out a thin metallic wand from his tunic, extending it to its full length before sticking it several inches into the ground. A tiny emitter mounted on the tip of the wand produced a high-frequency screech, bouncing from one buried rock to another, right back to where it had started, relating to Credo all that he needed to know. Topsoil, bit of a rocky formation near the bottom and some sa…wait, what's this? A dark shape occupied the majority of the screen, fully opaque, as no signal had managed to pass through it. Cross-checking with the downloaded map on his transmitter, Credo noticed that none of the four massive generators that fed the city with power were anywhere near him, nor was any active mining operation working near here. Puzzled, taken aback and decidedly confused, he grabbed his communicator and dialed the frequency that linked him to his command post and was rewarded with :

"Greetings, confirm identity and nature of problem."

Credo rattled off the designation he'd been branded with since childhood:

"Engineer 2B-831, affected to residential district number fourteen, reporting a natural discrepancy with the geological situation in sector eight-zero-two-two-one. Requesting skilled personnel assistance."

"Acknowledged. Sending assistance to signal coordinates."

Credo breathed out a sigh of relief at hearing those final words. Cutting off the link, he propped himself up against a large boulder, accomplishing the rest of his task, finally encrypting the lot and transferring it to Central Databank. Now, he thought, for evacuation and to clear up the matter of that obstacle…

A slight tremor in the ground caused Credo to leap up. A tiny plume of dust, coming from the white-walled city, quivered and shook in the morning breeze, growing larger as the rumble amplified.

Squinting, Credo could distinguish a dark shape, moving very fast yet in complete silence. In the permeating semi-obscurity, a large vehicle, amazingly mounted on wheels, halted ten paces from where Credo had done the frequency sweep, hatch doors flying open. Credo could barely see anything but a half-dozen figures leaping from the hold, busying themselves a few seconds near the problematic area, then running a full-fledged sprint away. Credo struggled to remember where he'd seen such a routine before. Vivid images of men fleeing from a charged det-pack sprang to his mind while his brain matched the two.

"By God…", he whispered.

He leaped behind the monolithic chunk of stone as the blasting charge ignited, sending waves of dust and debris rolling over himself and his protector. The sharp crack! of the deflagration, ripping through the still morning air like a knife through cloth, gave birth to brilliant tongues of flame, short lived but bright enough to make it seem like day for an instant.

Huddled as he was, Credo could not see the small group of figures plunge into the crater, but he did hear the continuous series of "tac tac tac"s, the screams of pain and outrage, but what struck him as most poignant was the complete and utter silence only moments later.

The poor man finally mustered enough courage after what seemed like an eternity, peering from beyond his crossed arms to see a winking crest of sunlight, unfolding himself from his protective cocoon and shook the dust from his short-cropped hair.

It was as if he were in a daze. He walked across the field, littered with metallic debris and chunks of stone as it was, eyes wide open, oblivious to his surroundings, his target burned into his mind's eye. That crater, dark and ominous, yet strangely inviting, seemed to be a veritable treasure trove of answers to his questions unasked…

Leaping the few feet separating the surface world to this alien land of tunnels and mines, he landed solidly on a floor of steel mesh and ceramic tile. Dark red stains, splats on the wall and skid marks on the floor, seemed to be eerie hosts to this macabre scene. Shallow holes, blown into the limestone in groups of two and three, lined a path of destruction as clear as Credo had ever seen. The wreckage led the befuddled man to a large antechamber, with a high roof dominated by a still feebly glowing viewscreen, now useless with the series of holes neatly drilled into it. Seven silhouettes sat there, listening with obvious intents to the measured words of an eighth person there.

As he entered, Credo stumbled on a jag in the now uneven flooring, causing the eight figures to explode into action, rolling until they each had a strange, elongated device trained on Credo's upper body. It occurred just now to the man how quiet he'd been while on his trek, a ghost in the land of the dead. He didn't feel very might now, eight glimmering red dots painted directly above his heart.

"Hold fire, he's with us!", one of them said, raising a gloved hand.

By God, Credo thought, these are Cleaners! Indeed they were. The slender figures had shed their traditional garb in favour of a full-body set of shock-absorbent armour, armour, Credo realized, that had been in part designed by him on orders of the Council! Shiny polymer gauntlets covered hands whose fingers slackened on the triggers on the devices that Credo recognized were firearms. Used to simple flare guns or beacon launchers, he felt a twinge of repulsion at the sight of these advanced, yet ultimately deadly instruments.

The apparent leader, he who in a sense had saved Credo's life, released the tight grip on the butt stock of his weapon and approached him.

"Citizen, identification, if you will."

Credo, despite his Asyle-trained perfect diction, stammered:

"E-E-Engineer 2B-831, affected to this sector."

The Cleaner turned to his comrades and declared in a tone spliced with an edge of irony:

"He's the one who called us in."

Pushed far beyond his limits, Credo blurted out, in a barely-contained anger born of confusion:

"But, where did I call you in? Where is here? And how did you know who I was?"

Had he been able to see his eyes through the outwardly opaque helmet and visor, Credo would've seen the expression a bureaucrat has when dictating an oft-rehearsed speech.

"To answer your first question, you are in a nest of highly dangerous Undesirables that Council deemed necessary to remove to conserve our current state of security. For your second, our tracker picked up a signal coming from the surface, a most unlikely place for one of them."

Suddenly, he stiffened, briskly turning to the remainder and pointing to a heavy metal door that had melted in with its general surroundings. The seven others mashed themselves on the outer sides of the blockade, hefting their weapons and flicking off the safety.

The commander removed a few loops of shiny plastic rings from the back of his belt. Blasting cord, Credo thought, as he recognized the innocuous-looking rings used to raze buildings and reconstruction. The black-decked Cleaner unlocked one end of the ring from its attaching detonator, looped three around the heavy steel bar securely fastened to the door and clicked it back into place.

"What in God's name are you doing, citizen?", jabbered Credo in a shrill voice.

"Invalid command", came back the overly-polite voice.

He flipped on the detonator.

Crack!

The sharp explosion rang out like a bell's toll in the cavernous antechamber, shearing through the metal with ease. In a flash, one of the Cleaners leaped from his protective hiding spot and kicked open the door with a booted heel.

Then all hell broke loose. Inside that doorway were three-dozen people, not scruffy-looking dirty Undesirables like Credo was used to see, but clean-shaven and groomed men and women that looked much like…Asylians?

Credo's train of thought was cut short by a trailing salvo of fire from the Cleaners' part. One man inside attempted to life his own weapon, only to have his face reduced to a bloody pulp by eight perfectly-placed shots. After only moments, a group attempted to force a sortie, only to be sent skidding back across the room in a trail of their own blood. The room was alight with muzzle flare, the floor littered with spent cartridges. After less than ten seconds of hailfire, the Cleaners flipped a switch on their weapons in perfect synchronization. Explosions gave way to pneumatically propelled projectiles; tiny flechettes biting into flesh, delivering their contents directly into their unfortunate recipients' veins.

The firefight seemed to stretch on forever in Credo's mortified eyes, though in reality, it had lasted less than fourteen seconds. In such an enclosed space, the insurgents hadn't had a chance. The room, turned to a slaughterhouse, was littered with bodies, some twitching spasmodically, some not, all of them turned as if to run. The Cleaners' shoulders seemed to sag. The squad leader reached to his helmet, tapping out a sequence on the rigid, plate-covered sensors.

"This is squad three-two-two, reporting affirmative action. Requesting evacuation for eight team members, one civilian and eight hostiles. Over and out."

The team each grabbed one of the twitching bodies, disciplining muscle spasms with muscle strength. Pulling from their pockets a syringe pistol, not unlike the ones used every day in Asyle, and applied in on the neck of their victims, watching the silvery needle plunge into the soft flesh. The bodies released at once, but with death or with salvation, Credo was unsure.

Bending down gingerly to examine a body in the supposed storeroom, Credo shifted a cadaver that had been lying on its side, horrified to notice that the woman had had part of her jaw blown off, along with a chunk of her forehead.

"By God", he murmured.

One of the Cleaners, mistaking the cowed whisper for one of admiration, strode over to him, leaning on the superimposed double barrel of his weapon.

"Mighty fine weaponry the Asylians make, huh?"

He leaned over and, much to Credo's displeasure, rummaged awhile in the corpse's mouth, extracting a projectile from the back of her head. Bringing it close to the engineer's pasty white face, he made it rotate in a bloodied pair of fingers.

"Hollowpoint, standard ammunition for all of Asyle's security forces, designed to fit any kind of chamber. These babies flatten on impact, bursting through skin with the diameter of a decent-sized bolt."

"A-And what about them?" , Credo whimpered, pointing to the captive bodies.

"Oh, them? Sedated. They're pumped full of it. HQ put in a little surprise in it too. Just in case they manage to escape, head office mixed in a potent neurotoxin, able to take down a man in seconds. We watered it down, of course. Still, they'd die in around two minutes if we weren't there with the neutralizing agent. Ah, evac's here. "

The Cleaner's helmet acted up, the crackling voice from the commuter resonating up to Credo's ears. The eight-man crew hauled the still bodies on their backs and started trekking through the grisly corridor, following their "tracks", as Credo had done before. On the surface world, dawn had risen, rays of sunlight burning through the misty haze of morning. The very same transporter that had heralded then men's arrival was waiting for them, cargo door wide open. The Cleaners each dumped their loads in the hold, slammed down the steel hatch and took their respective places in the back. Credo, having followed them from the very start, sat down gingerly next to the squad leader, buckled his safety harness and waited for the rumble of the engine to start up. The hour-long trip was executed in quasi-religious silence, interrupted only by jags in the road. It only occurred to Credo then that he had left his equipment at the site.

Passing into Asyle by a network of tunnels and gates, the enormous vehicle surfaced in a brightly lit hangar, illuminated by rows and rows of fluorescent tubes. Credo staggered out, his head spinning, mind latched onto one thing: to get out. Taking the nearest portal designated with an exit glyph, he burst out into the bustling heart of the metropolis. Momentarily dazzled by the flare of sunshine, he turned and noticed the stone façade of the building he'd just left, the Palace of Justice. Jostled to and fro like a sailor lost at sea, Credo shoved his way through the mob of people making their way in and out of the their designated work areas, ending up in a darkened alleyway forming the junction between two academies. He paused, drawing a deep lungful of filtered air…and vomited. Wiping the sick from the trip of his tunic, he broke down, knees buckling, hands to his face.

What had happened? Soldiers? Soldiers! There were professional killers in Asyle? What was this madness?

Credo retched once more. Is this truly what God wills? And what of the weaponsmiths? Did they even know they were merchants of death?

Tears rimmed reddened eyes as Credo drifted. What did that make him then? He called in the help, he cursed these people to a shallow grave, he caused them to die! Blood stained his hands now, blood could not, would not, be washed. He was as responsible for these atrocities as those who had perpetuated them.

And what of the people killed? Children, women, the elderly, all of which would not see the sun rise again. And the ones taken to be judged? Justice is a cruel one, blind to the needs of those who are dependant of her…God wouldn't help me now, he thought.

"Well then, burn in the hell that you've created", he let out through gritted teeth.

The Council had no right to do this. These Undesirables, these…people, had been living outside of city walls, therefore unrestricted by Asylian laws. This was unjustified killing, murder in its worst form. Even if their hate of Asyle and all of its inhabitants was true, and even if they were armed…

The realization struck Credo like a load of bricks.

He had been sent there to die. The Council knew that the selected site wasn't just an empty patch of dirt. They knew Credo would call for help, otherwise, why would they have sent soldiers as first response?

By God, it all made sense. The city had a cast pool of skilled Engineers to pick and choose from, why had a low-ranked one such as Credo been sent out for such an assignment?

He avoided the major crowds on his way back to Living Complex number fourteen, avoided the mobs of cogs and gears in the machine of death. Punching in his access code with a frustration known only to himself, he stumbled inside his chamber. Derek was at the Academy, he wouldn't be back for hours. He crumbled onto his cot, praying to fall into the merciful realm of slumber. But alongside sleep, rest was absent as his dreams were haunted with nightmares, punctuated with the screams of innocents raked by gunfire.

Flashes of faces of then and now floated in his mind's eye, of Derek, of himself, of his beloved Catherine. The latter's bright eyes twinkled, gave him a sly wink and vanished, to be replaced with the glazed look of a cadaver. The abomination's mouth gaped wide open, lopsidedly as half of it was nothing but flaps of flaccid skin and bloody sores, and let out a terrible shriek of anguish that chilled the hairs on Credo's immaterial spine. The shrill scream pounded his eardrums, threatening to burst them until…he awoke with a startle.

His thin torso gleamed with sweat in the quiet glow of moonlight. Just a dream, he told himself for the second time in fourty-eight hours. When would this torture end? He glanced outside to the gigantic viewscreen that dominated the horizon, mocking him with every toothy grin of that wretched monster plastered on it. Pale green numbers shone brightly below it, attracting his eye. Midnight.

The symbolic value of the hour was lost on Credo as he strode decidedly out from his sleeping quarters, features tightened in a grimace of determination.

"I shan't be part of this madness…", he whispered to himself.

He walked over to his wardrobe, looting from it a spare set of clothes with warm trim, an eight-quart flask of water and a pack of dehydrated food pellets he kept around for long-range assignments. With these, he took the standard syringe pistol and a medical kit containing three clips of morphine, plasma and congealing agent. He turned to leave, when his ears picked up a stifled moan.

His clomping around had caused a stir in the neighboring room. Derek had gone to bed at the twentieth hour, as he did every day without being bided to. He was whimpering in his cot, very much in the throes of a small dream.

"I shan't be part of this madness", Credo repeated, "and neither will you…"

With a flick of a switch above the trigger, he popped open the loader and fit a clip of morphine into his injector. Extending the circular sights, he rested them onto his son's neck, directly into the vein feeding his heart with used blood.

With a grim, but decided look in his eyes, Credo applied force to the tiny lever, taking solace in hearing the puff of air from the pressure-released needle burrowing deep into tender flesh. For a few precious seconds, Derek felt absolutely no pain in the world, completely detached from reality, not a care at all as the sedative numbed his senses, slowing down his heartbeat to nil.

Fighting back tears, Credo lovingly pulled the sheets over the child's head and left, identity card in hand and rage boiling in his heart. Slipping on his heavy work boots, he threw his supplies in a duffel bag and slunk off into the night.

The last use of Credo's magnetized card registered as being the commission of a transport platform bordering Gatehouse 3. There seemed to be only one source of answers for Credo : the place that had spawned so many questions in the first place.

He had to see it again, the smoking crater strewn with wreckage and mutilated carcasses, the handiwork so unmistakably clean, so….Asylian. The cool night wind whipped Credo's hair around like a ship in a storm, biting into his face with a hunger known only to Nature. It was so different, he thought, so unlike his climate-controlled home city. No, not his home city. Just a cold, faceless entity now.

The platform's magnetic thrusters slowed to a halt a few feet from the wound pierced into the ground's features, its imputed coordinates reached. Credo hopped off the metallic surface, falling the short distance that separated him from relentless rock. The crater seemed ominous, as if a monster were lurking down in the darkness, ready to spring upon an unwary traveler's head. But Credo knew that there were worse things than monsters in life. Truth, reality, humanity, all of which were part of the Asylian moral code. Credo threw in a quick peek, checking if any glass of serrated pieces of metal would halt his fall in a more or less painful manner. Seeing none, he leaped, landing securely on his feet, balancing himself with his hands. The blasted plaster walls served as a grim reminder of what had transpired only hours before.

The walk to the main antechamber seemed to stretch on eternally, probably because Credo was in full control of his senses now. But still, the cracked viewscreen and the askew blast door did little to boosts his spirits. Peering inside the newly adorned meat locker, his curiosity was rewarded by a shrill whisper from himself:

"What in the name of…"

Nothing. The room was barren. No bodies, no bullets, no answers. The hope that had slowly been surfacing within Credo was drained, to be replaced with bubbling rage and crushing disappointment. But…wait a minute…, he thought, if there is no trace of anything here, that means…it was cleaned! Someone was still here!

A new surge of will filled Credo like drink, driving him to all fours, sniffing the ground for a trace, any trace of the answers he so desperately seeked. There had to be something here, there just had to be…

There wasn't. Any footprints had been wiped, fingerprints had been smudged. The man collapsed, breathing heavily while collecting his thoughts. His eyes perused the walls of the concrete coffin, looking everywhere, screaming bodies thudding to the floor still fresh in his mind's eye. The bullet holes in the walls mocked him, egging him own, pleading for anger and tears.

For the second time in less than an hour, realization struck Credo.

Wait a minute…

Too many people had been packed into this chamber for bullets to rip through them and slam into the wall with enough force to leave a mark.

And darts didn't leave holes.

Credo rushed to one of the dark dots in the concrete, eyes set on his goal, which was the eerie crimson yet ultimately satisfying splotch of blood. Must've been too small for a rushed man to notice and clean, Credo thought. And if that one hadn't been noticed…

That's it! Credo cocked his head at an angle, bathing the entire surface of the floor with the dim glow of his work lamp. Dull smudges appeared as if by magic, contrasting sharply with the burnished sheen of the flooring. Thin lines of dried blood emerged from all corners of the room, meeting near the base of the wall and stopped. The trail was cold again, it would seem. But not for Credo, who had been raised in an environment where every cubic foot of empty space was employed with optimized efficiency. Credo walked over to the other end of the room, facing the mysterious wall, pacing its length, drumming out a rapid tattoo with his fingernails on the concrete slabs, sounding much like the pitter-patter of rain on a tin roof.

Toc toca toc toca toc toca tink!

A thin smile wormed its way into Credo's face as he arched his back, lodging his fingertips within the shallow grooves presented by the slab of concrete. Flexing his muscles, he grew taunt as a spring, pulling with all of his might, pushing himself beyond his natural limits. He grasped at every nick and crevice of the monolithic piece of stone, bloodying his fingers and grinding his nails raw. But to no avail. However hard he tried, the slab of concrete remained immovable.

With energy born from frustration, Credo grabbed a shattered beam of steel from the dusty floor, its jagged edges digging deep red lines in his palms. Grasping it like a club, he gave a solid thwack! to the wall, gouging down the stone half an inch. Revigorated by the fruit of his labours, he tapped into hidden stores of energy, channeling his rage through the one outlet available: that God-forsaken piece of rock.

After fifteen minutes of furious whacks, Credo stood before his handiwork on wobbly legs, arms lacerated by flying pieces of shrapnel, hair matted with a sticky mixture of dust and sweat. The slab blocking the way had been split to pieces, giving way to a cleverly hidden ventilation shaft. Among the rubble of what had moments ago been the back of the concrete were buried two handles that had allowed a fleeing individual to pull the "door" closed behind him.

The tunnel was cramped, only large enough for Credo to crawl through. A sickly sweet smell of cloyed blood and cloistered death permeated the area, overpowering the young man, threatening to make him sick. In a morbid irony, the only way for Credo to know where he was going was to follow the slick trail of dried blood, a snaking path of questions leading to a treasure trove of answers.

After several minutes crawling in stygian gloom, Credo saw a tiny pinpoint of light only about twenty meters off. Hope sprang anew within him. What would he find back there? Friend? Foes? A mixture of the two?

Bursting into the light, Credo's eyes had little time to adjust to the sudden change in luminosity, and so they burned in protest. Even then, the disheveled young man had even less time, as an electrified wand, much like the ones used in Asyle, was thrust into his ribs, delivering fifty thousand volts of pure energy into his system in a fraction of a second.

Credo flopped to the ground like a landed fish, squirming around, his brain overcharged by the enormous charge of power, muscles moving and twitching of their own accord. The last thing he saw before slipping into merciful unconsciousness was a dark shape looming over him, loosely holding the blunt wand.

Pangs of pain erupting in his head stirred Credo. His tongue was cut and bruised and his ribs were still numb.

"Wh-where am I?", he asked out to the empty room.

His hands were cuffed to the back of the chair he was sitting in, tight enough so that he couldn't wriggle out of them with ease.

"You don't need to preoccupy yourself with that right now", came the surprisingly close answer.

Credo head swiveled around to spot the speaker, but in the dimly-lit room, shadows danced along with the light, making it impossible to focus on one particular point. Movement in a corner attracted Credo's eye, barely discerning the outline of a man. Sensing discovery, the figure stepped out into the light, directly in front of Credo.

"Greetings, Engineer 2B-830, citizen of Asyle. We've been expecting you. We heard you knock."

Credo blanched visibly and gulped.

"How did you know that?"

The figure reached within his cloak and removed a chipped and cracked transmitter, the very instrument Credo had left behind on his previous visit. Oh boy…

"Don't think of us as stupid, Engineer. We know much more than you might think."

"Who are we?"

"We are the very people you Asylians are sworn to destroy, the ones whose lifestyle you disrupt in the name of justice and liberty for all. Liberty, for Asylians?"

Quick as a flash, something silvery appeared in the stranger's hand. He leaped upon Credo, the blade of what Credo recognized as a knife slicing through his skin with ease, digging a deep line within his forearm. The stranger seemed to spot what he wanted and under Credo's horrified glance, flicked out a tiny metallic cylinder.

"Your calling card, I suppose?"

Wiping his blade on his prisoner's sleeve, he loosely held the newfound object between his index and his thumb. Credo's incredulous look told him all he needed to know.

"You don't know what this is?"

Credo slowly shook his head, too shocked to feel the slowly dripping blood run off of his hand.

"This is your birthright, a chunk of metal pumped into your arm the minute you are born. It contains your personal information, your access codes and…and…"

The stranger's eyes widened.

"Shit."

He threw the little chip on the floor, slamming a booted heel on it, spreading circuits and silicate dust on the otherwise impeccable floor.

"Wh-what?", gasped Credo.

The man grabbed the poor Asylian's shirt collar, pulling him close enough to his face so that Credo could feel his hot breath, whispering in his ear in a raspy, quiet and utterly terrifying tone:

"Think you're clever, bringing your goddamned tracking chip here? You'll be staying here a while by the way, unless you screw something up. If so, well…we'll just leave it at that."

The man whispered something into his lapel, carelessly letting Credo catch a few words like "buffing defenses" and "our special guest". He started to turn, probably to leave, when he called out to Credo:

"It is your choice if you view this stay as a visit or a jail sentence. Choose wisely. I am Adrian, Chairman of the Front. Some of my people will be in here shortly to tend to you. Don't bother looking for a way out. You could look around for years before finding an exit. Good day, Engineer."

He stepped through the pale halo of light that denoted an exit and was gone, leaving Credo alone with a whirlwind of thoughts. Every time he gets an answer, another question was born…

A tracking chip?

His train of thought was interrupted by the arrival of an orderly dressed in pale blues. Flicking on the fluorescent lighting, he gingerly grasped Credo's bleeding arm, his bright blue eyes twinkling.

"Quite a scratch there man. No worries though."

He tore the wrapper off of a sterile gauze pad, and after slathering the cut with a greenish disinfectant, he tightly draped it on the line of red, effectively locking off the wound from getting any worse.

"There we go, snug as a bug in a rug. Oh, and here you are."

He produced a slim key, inserting it in the cuffs and twisting clockwise. Credo heard the tumblers in the simple lock click and wriggled his hands out of the steel manacles. Rubbing his sore wrists, the Asylian looked at the young worker quizzically, his eyes asking who are you and what is this?

"Head Office asked me to let you go, on the condition that you don't try to leave the complex or hurt anyone." came the curt statement, the young man sensing the obvious question.

The orderly turned to leave, motioning for Credo to follow him. He walked through the sliding doors and for once, Credo could appreciate the ingenuity and sheer brilliance that had gone towards creating such an encampment.

Criss-crossed beams of steel lined a solid concrete roof that in turn supported a gigantic viewscreen. A possibility illuminated Credo's mind at the moment. This is Asylian work! He tailed the pleasant man who had freed him, noticing that, in stark contrast to his previous home, people stopped their daily business to greet one another, often pausing simply to shake a passerby's hand.

The blue-decked man seemed to see what he'd been searching for, an elderly man with a pinch of salt-and-pepper hair on his chin but none on his head, and ran to his side, bringing quickly whispered words to his ear and pointing several times to Credo. The older one's expression lit up and he hobbled over to the Engineer with a haste that belied his age.

"You're the new refugee, aren't you?", he asked in a throaty voice.

Credo coked his head curiously, voicelessly asking the meaning of his question.

"You know, a refugee. Someone who had a technical glitch and got sick of Asyle? Someone who felt that Asyle wasn't all that it claimed to be?"

His answer only bolstered Credo's resolve at taking such a decision.

"Yes. That would be correct. But…technical glitch?"

The old man gave him a sly grin and furrowed his brows.

"I see you still don't know how Asyle works. That'll come in time. My office is always open if you need me, number nine."

He left, leaving a flurry of questions in his wake. Technical glitch? What glitch could affect humans? Of course, Asylian authorities hadn't been very honest with him lately, nor in the past, nor in any probably future…

And what of that remark? "You still don't know how Asyle works"…Of course he did! Utter rubbish. Senile old bat must've gone dotty in his age…

And yet…

Yet, why did he feel as if the old man was right? Nobody but Father really knew how Asyle really worked…

After minutes of entirely quiet musings, Credo found himself subconsciously drifting through the corridors, counting off the numbers on the plaques fixed to the wall. Three…four…five…The door to number nine was slightly ajar, projecting a thin ray of light into the corridor. He tapped a timid trio of knocks on the enamel-coated entrance and, hearing no response, pushed through the doorway. What met him were rows upon rows of cabinets, filled to the brim with files, certificates and various other papers. Shelves lined the walls, bending near the point of cracking under the weight of strange stacks of paper and cardboard. And behind a large desk near the back of the room was the old man, a knowing smile concealed in his thin lips.

"To be honest with you, I was expecting you a little later. Must be getting rattled in my old age…"

Credo gestured to the rows of shelves and cabinets.

"What is all this?"

"That, my friend, is the greatest collection of history and literature in the world! I am Marshal Anton Billings, archivist of the Front, keeper of secrets and memories. This is my domain, realm of knowledge and sanctuary of the past. What is your name, my boy?"

"I am Engineer 2B-831, affected to residential district fourteen."

The old man smirked an odd smile, of quiet acknowledgement and subtle pity.

"Not that name son, your real name."

That statement hit Credo like a brick wall. His real name?

"Credo, my name is Credo."

"A subtle twang of satire and morbid irony. I like it.", the old man replied, "Now, are you ready Credo?"

"Ready? For what exactly?"

"We're going to take a trip down memory lane, dive deep into the annals of history, delve into the misty corners of the unexplored. Do you trust me to guide you? Do you dare to dream?"

Credo smiled, probably the first time in his life where his smile was sincere.

"Do I have a choice?"

The old man flashed him a grin, digging within the folds of his tunic and produced a thin vial of glass, cleverly made so that it would fit in the grooves of one's grip. Within it were several ounces of a clear liquid, thick enough that it lapped at the crystal walls of the bottle.

"I understand that you are Asylian, Credo, and therefore do not understand the significance of what I am about to do. Just remember that you trust me."

He unscrewed the circular stopper which, Credo noticed, was fitted underneath with a short and thick needle that tapered down to a wicked point. Anton Billings dipped the needle into the thick concoction and watched the play of lights from the dark, glistening barb.

"Give me your hand, Credo," he said in a quiet tone that Credo realized as he extended his arm carried an underlying wave of excitement.

The last thing Engineer 2B-831 ever heard was a hurriedly whispered "Trust me!".

Billings firmly grasped Credo's forearm, drawing a thin line of red on his palm with the wet needle. At first, Credo didn't even feel the pain, only a numbness that permeated his entire arm. The numbness spread, covering his shoulder, chest, legs and finally, his head.

There, Credo witnessed firsthand what the terms "a blast from the past" meant.

An explosion of pain brought a flurry of memories crashing down in his mind. Flashes of his past life accompanied vivid flares of bright colours, his creation at the Birthing Ward, his instruction at the Academy, the face of his Catherine, dearest Catherine…

Credo…

Credo, can you hear me?

The sound that came from his lips in reality was a strained croak.

Credo!

The pleasant sensation of being enveloped in a warm blanket was yanked out from under him, bringing him back to the harsh realities of the real world.

Marshal Billings was sitting in front of him, holding a small circular box.

"Credo, are you alright?"

The youngish man shook away the spider webs that danced before his eyes and regained his presence of mind.

"Yes, yes, quite alright. What in G…what was that?"

The old marshal shook the tiny vial in front of him and declared:

"That, my boy, is the pride and joy of our society. I could tell you its real name but I'd be here for hours. We call it ichor, blood of the gods that stems from the severed arteries of our people. Do you know why I did what I did?"

Credo slowly shook his head, still recovering from the experience.

"You see, you are an Asylian. From even before your birth, your blood, your mind itself has been laced with inhibitants of all shapes and sizes. Anger repressors, anti depressants, emotional detractors and the list goes on. Do not ask me why your Council does this, that I do not know. What I do know is that there's a little something in your body that dissolved it. Do you know what that is?"

Credo shook his head again, feeling as stupid as he's ever felt.

"Adrenaline," Billings said with a smirk.

"Yes, adrenaline. Something you saw or did generated enough of that substance to purge a fair bit of sedative from your body."

Credo shuddered, trying to blot out the visions of innocent people shot and killed only a few hundred meters away. What he did remember were the colours, bright red blood constrasting sharply with the stark white of the walls. Quite a difference from the drab grays of Asyle. Or was Asyle really empty of colours?

Of course. That's why they sent me to die. They knew I'd come back drained of the chemicals.

"Ichor is a powerful substance, an anti-inhibitant of tremendous value. I gave you enough of a dosage to neutralize pretty much all foreign chemicals in your body. Now, your cleansing was only step one. Ready for number two?"

Billings needed no answer. Placing the small circular object he'd been carrying between Credo and himself, he backed away and pressed a button on a remote he had concealed in his sleeve, darkening the room. He smiled and pressed another.

A thin green glow emerged from the lens of the box, permeating the air of the room, veritably making it ripple with ionized energy.

"Now then Credo, tell me of Asyle. Where and how did it start?"

The young man cleared his throat, unsure of what he should say. Finally, he took a chance and recited the mantra that had been drilled into his mind since he could barely walk.

"Well…the Elders say that Asyle was created by a band of pious pilgrims, full of virtue and courage. They, along with anyone having been spared by the Coming of the Clouds, established the building that now stands as a banner to our proud people, our Cathedral. God has shown our people the Truth, and we've followed it."

Billings, seemingly impassible, remained unfazed by the sudden change in the air, and his next words came heavy with an edge of sarcasm.

"And what of this coming of the clouds? What happened then?"

Now that a fire of passion had been lit within Credo, words flowed freer.

"God smote the wicked people of the world with fire and brimstone, burning down the evil institutions of the heretics of old. Flames and lightning rained from the sky, a clear demonstration of God's almighty power. And for three hundred days and three hundred nights, the sun itself was blotted out by God's will, wilting the plants that had not been burned by the falling sulphur. The anarchy of yon had been quenched by the will of God himself."

The old man facing Credo frowned, scratching his chin pensively.

"Really? God himself saved the world from anarchy and chaos? And there are records and witnesses of such an event?"

"The tale has been penned by the disciples of Father, yes."

"And such disciples were at the event, of course?"

"Well…no…but…"

"But this changes everything," the old man cried, "teachings made from mouth to ear get changed in the years, for the better or worse! Entire orders have lived on in the past on the testimonies of people who were not there!

"There was no order in the past!", blurted out the younger man.

Billings' next look could have split stone. Credo recoiled instinctively, wondering if the frail old relic would leap to his throat, so venomous was the glare he shot at him. Billings relaxed visibly, his tense shoulders sagging, and began again with a deliberately slow voice:

"Credo, my dear boy, you are new here, so I shall forgive you. All that shines is not gold. I am going to show you something, something that should have been shown to you a long time ago."

The remote that was loosely held in his hand was brought up and activated once more.

Suddenly, the air that only minutes ago had been crackling with energy was filled with a strangely empty buzzing, then exploded with light. The small projector that had been sitting at Credo's feet spewed out a gigantic globe spread with darker blotches, pale green and wavering.

"What is that!", shrieked Credo, who had backed off into a corner.

"This is the planet you are currently occupying. Well, it's what it looked like two hundred years ago."

Credo summoned the courage and gathered the little dignity he had left and returned to his place.

"But, it doesn't make sense! Why is there water between the land?"

"There still is Credo, and there always will be. Those are called oceans, and they separate the land we call continents. In the birth of the second millennium, humanity used these to gather food, travel and ferry goods across the world."

"What food is there to be had in water? There is no sun in there!"

Anton Billings smirked and flipped a switch on his remote.

"You see Credo, hundreds of years ago, humans were not the only inhabitants of the world. We shared the planet with other life forms, life called animals.

The huge globe gave view to a myriad of images, of enormous four-legged beasts with unwieldy noses, of spindly-looking beings with elongated necks, even of things that looked vaguely like humans, save for the fact that they were covered in fur.

"And what happened to them? I mean, I've never seen those things." Credo asked.

"Nor shall you ever. Most were killed in the event you refer to as the Clouds, but some clever chaps has the bright idea to take portions of their genetic coding and store it away, I imagine in Asyle. The entire Animal Kingdom must be sitting on some dusty shelf in a databank."

Another button brought the transparent globe back.

"Credo, what I am about to show you is the tale of the very extinction of the human race as we knew it. Brace yourself, you won't enjoy the ride."

A large chunk of the eastern portion of the globe lit up, shifting from pale green to bright yellow.

"You see, in the year 2034, what you'd call God's Year 2034, the civilization known as the People's Republic of China had surpassed the one called the United States of America in both technology and economic strength. A peaceful balance of trade and culture was maintained between the two, with friendly exchange of goods and ideas frequent. The tiny state of Iraq, a people conquered by America in 2017, was still rolling in turmoil after its invasion, turmoil that had lasted long before the actual political declaration. It had had twelve governments in the past five years, each one succumbing to killings or impeachment. The people were afraid, ready to grasp at whatever straws foreign ideologies would offer them. On what was known as July 3rd, 2034, a technical glitch in Iraq's main computer system caused the launch of thirty Hawkeye-class nuclear-tipped warheads, weapons that had been commissioned by the Americans specifically for self-defense. With a flight path erroneously programmed into them, these missiles were meant for the main urban centers of America, each one capable to flatten a major city. More than half of these were shot down in mid-flight over Britain, France, Germany and the Atlantic Ocean, but the other half…"

Under Credo's incredulous gaze, thirty tiny holographic arrows were shot from the tiny dot under the splotch labeled "Dead Sea". Eighteen of those exploded in a flash of light while still far away from the land mass dubbed "America", but the other twelve reached it, sinking through various points in it, causing circular red splats to emerge from where they disappeared.

"One hundred fifty million, three hundred fourty thousand was the official death toll when the metropolises of New York, Detroit, Denver, Chicago, Boston, Seattle and Washington were wiped off of the map forever, Add the four hundred thirty thousand deaths from nuclear fallout coming from intercepted warheads and you'll find that the equivalent of sixteen times the population of Asyle had been murdered in less than a day. Naturally, the American government was devastated, with its main body of leadership dismantled. It replicated the assault tenfold, turning the state of Iraq, their own territory, into the world's largest glass parking lot. David hadn't quite finished off its Goliath, but of course, you won't understand the analogy."

The dot called "Iraq" blinked out of existence from the globe.

"The world was shocked," continued Billings, flashing, footage of enormous craters and carbonized land, "but none more so than mighty China, who had been flexing its political muscles for quite a while now and who obtained more than three quarters of its crude oil reserves from Iraq. You see, in those years, in those years, the world was prey to a terrible crisis concerning oil, a thick black liquid formed of the compressed remains of creatures dead millions of years ago. Who had it? What was it used for? How to get more? Such a liquid was vital to any country, as it was the lifeblood of the transportation and chemical industries. Armies could not move without oil, nor could a civilian heading to work. I apologize for the alien terms and bulk of information I'm giving you Credo, but it's of capital importance that you understand."

Credo, having been still for the past twenty minutes, remembered to breathe again and motioned for the old archivist to continue.

"China, having been stripped of its oil, economy in tatters, did the only thing it rightly could: launch a catastrophic counter-counter-assault on America, wiping out anybody who had been spared the first holocaust, suffering in return a barrage of warheads fired by America's staunchest allies. The only continent that had widely escaped the atomic destruction was Africa, whose people were decimated by the millions by a terrible wind-borne pandemic that spread by touch and breath. The resulting cataclysm engendered a phenomenon dubbed nuclear winter, where enormous clouds of dust manage to blot out the Sun's rays for months, sometimes longer. This particular one lasted near to three hundred days and destroyed any vegetation spared by the blasts. Sound familiar?"

Billings took off his spectacles, wiped them on his tunic front and took a deep breath.

"But the reports were wrong."

The gigantic globe disappeared, to be replaced by a pale green viewscreen.

"In the 2010s, a splinter group branched off from the mainstream religions, incorporating aspects from the then Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, down to the very God whose name you invoked several times earlier. Their leader? A certain Robert DuValle."

The image of a man phased to existence on the screen, a man whose hawkish nose and high cheekbones Credo knew all too well.

"That's Father!" he blurted out.

"Indeed it is. Blooming genius he was."

"But, that means…"

"Yes Credo. If Robert DuValle is indeed Father, that means that Father has been dead for almost a hundred and fifty years."

To break the oppressive silence, Billings gave a phlegm-filled cough and resumed his monologue.

"The cult grew in importance over the years, drawing in members that drifted from their respective flock after the scandals involving the assassinations of several high-ranking members of both Islam and Christianity by goons of the opposite religion. Mathematicians, physicians, scholars of every shape and size were drawn together in what was even today the greatest gathering of minds in the world. DuValle worked closely with the men and women who were deemed brilliant, instituting a sense of utter devotion and dangerous fanaticism within them. With that newfound sense of power and strength, they developed tools and items that were beyond anyone's expectations. Software, chemicals and machines were produced in large quantities and with these, DuValle had an iron grip on almost all technology created in the industrialized countries. One such piece of software was one called Meteora, a program able to overwrite any data on a circuit using advanced methods of encryption. It would send the data surging back and forth within a specific part of the circuit until it would literally bend with the heat, forming new connections and installing the commands it was sent with. In 2031, the Asylians, as their peers called them, had a powerful hold on almost every political system of the globe. Every elected official had at least some ties with DuValle and would obey to a direct order. Such an order was given on July 3rd, 2034, where DuValle and his advisors decided to make the boldest step in the known history: the destruction of society as we knew it. They installed Meteora in the Iraqi computer networks, those that controlled the military operations, and set off the largest cataclysm known to Man, blaming the conveniently rampant turmoil and faulty computers. No one knew the cause and those who did know did not tell. The perfect planning executed the perfect crime."

Credo could almost hear his world crashing around him. Asyle, nay, Father had caused the fall of humanity?

"But…what about Africa? Nothing hit it, and those missiles that you talked about didn't carry disease with them!" he blubbered.

"Aye, no missiles hit it. Remember when I spoke of the plague that hit it? Robert DuValle was a brilliant geneticist, it was he who thought it a bright move to collect DNA samples from every species of living beings. It was also he who engineered a special type of being, a virus, with potentially fatal infection. Agent Cloud, as it was called, was impregnated with the contagious qualities of the already deadly Ebola disease and with the virulent death patterns of the widespread AIDS virus and tuberculosis. Basically, this airborne killer would enter your lungs, pass on to your bloodstream, utterly wipe out your immune system and finish you off by rotting out your lungs. You would die a painful death, with inability to breathe as a final symptom. An afflicted person typically had around twelve to twenty-four hours to live, all the while propagating the disease to anyone near him."

Billings tapped out a sequence on him remote, and illustrated a tiny point on the globe, right on the very edge of the jagged coastline of the patch called "Africa".

"This land, Credo, is where Asyle stands today. On the ruins of the city called Djibouti and on the bones of its people. Djibouti was one of the first areas to suffer Agent Cloud. It was inseminated in a thundercloud by an airplane carrying fourty canisters of the sickness. Djibouti suffered rain for two weeks afterwards, rain contaminated with the agent that had stayed in suspension within the rain droplets themselves. The city population was eliminated in less than half that time."

"This is madness…" Credo whispered, "sheer madness…"

Billings slowly strode over to Credo, lifted his drooping chin in wrinkle-riddled hands and whispered to his face:

"No Credo, this is Truth. The truth that once separated us from animals, the truth that once defined who we were and why we were here."

The old archivist stood up to his full height, which wasn't much to say the least, and pointed to the curved ceiling.

"Do you know where we are, Credo?"

Credo looked up, only seeing an elegantly curving ceiling decorated with glowing tubes of light.

"Erm…your Chairman said that we were in the headquarters of what the Asylians would call Undesirables, am I correct in such an assumption?"

"Correct you are my boy, but not in the way that I wanted, thus, I shall ask you again. Do you know where we are?"

Credo's blank gaze expressed his confusion in such an eloquent way.

"We are standing in what used to be Laboratory Four, a minor testing area where Agent Cloud was both created and used for the first time. DuValle and his minions disused it after the initial blitz and basically left it intact for us to occupy. When we first discovered it, much like you did when you first found us, we uncovered documents that had been preserved in the very dry environment. Thankfully, no toxic material was found within the core areas, but the brittle walls had to be replaced with steel and stone, materials we'd been hoarding and slowly accumulating from various lootings care of Asyle and her inhabitants. Documents were one thing, but we never expected to find our biggest present: the ancient laboratory in perfect condition. Sure, vials had to be dusted and tables replaced, but the machinery was in impeccable condition."

Billings blew out a sigh of relief and sat down on his swiveling chair.

"So there you have it. Reports may have been falsified, and tales may have been embellished, but Asyle was and always will be a wolf in sheep's clothing. Asyle? More like an asylum."

Credo had sat through the entire ordeal with a slack jaw, eyes unmoving, dry from a lack of blinking. His breath came in short and he could hear his heart thumping wildly within his chest.

"But…if all you say is true…"

"It is true, Credo."

"If all you said is true, why weren't Fathe…DuValle's disciples harmed?"

"Mostly because they hid underground while the earth above them was blazing. Apparently, they had concealed days upon days worth of food and water in underground facilities for months before the apocalypse and as such, were easily spared by the disease and fire."

"Yes, but why were they spared by the disease? If it was as easily transportable as you say, shouldn't at least some of it gotten down to them?"

Billings lowered his gaze, took off his spectacles and stared directly into Credo's face.

"Credo, would you believe that I have only lived for seventy-four years?"

Credo leaned in to get a better look at his interlocutor, as his face was largely obscured by a section of darkness. When Billings tilted his head, a ray of head passed over his face and Credo gasped at what the result yielded. Marshal Anton Billings was ancient. The contours of his face were rendered uneven with pockmarks and riddles, his eyes so lined with wrinkles it was a wonder he could see from them. The little hair he had on his head was grayed and wispy and only the short beard he was cultivating had any semblance of life. Liver spots adorned the bald pate that was his head, shiny under the dim glow of the fluorescent lighting.

"Yes Credo. You see, over the years, the longevity of Man's life has been extended by a considerable bit. Passing from thirty less than a millennia ago to over a hundred is nothing short of a miracle. Credo, you and all other like you are the epitome of modern Man. Asylians are created, crafted if you will, to be genetically perfect. No hereditary diseases, no malformations and the utter optimization of the physique and mind of every infant born. How old are you, my friend?"

Credo was only fourty-four, very young in the Asylian community and therefore, very low in the hierarchy that governed the city and its people. His silence was as much of an answer Billings what going to get.

"This eugenic perfection is what gives the Asylians their strength, and also the key to their weakness. Over the years, Asyle has been literally locked off from any form of virus, sealing the blood purity within their bodies. This isolation has given way to a decomposition of their immune systems no disease could have ever done. The body is a machine, Credo, and a machine that does not work rusts. Asyle itself has become a bubble of health, a veritable cradle of life."

Credo's eyes were downcast, with shame or with pensiveness, Billings knew not. But the dull glow that accompanied his triumphant smirk when he rose to stare him down, he recognized immediately.

"Go now, my friend, be the instrument of our vengeance, the channel to our unity! Unity brings strength, and strength brews power!"

Credo firmly grasped the old man's hand, leaned over and whispered in his ear:

"You will suffer by their hands no longer. Thank you, my…friend. Thank you for giving me back my humanity."

He embraced the old man in a great hug and stomped out of the room, life breathed back into his soul.

Friend, he thought, what an odd word.

Credo strode by the corridors, following the chain of numbered offices all across the complex. Up and down, east and west, all around the place until he finally arrived where he had started. Rubbing a slightly sweaty hand across his face with frustration, Credo was beginning to understand what Chairman Adrian had meant when he'd mentioned that he could look around for years without finding an exit. Right before he was strongly considering punching a hole through a wall, a pair of annoyingly chipper youngsters bustled past him, blabbering on about a "meeting" and "big decisions". Despite his conscience furiously yelling at him to turn back, Credo followed the lads, casually strutting around as if he belonged here, until he arrived at an air locked steel door, its circular jambs turned fully, its frame buckled tightly. At its base, a man with a heavily adorned belt stood guard, admitting the two youngsters who had flashed a tiny badge that was pinned to their chests.

Adopting a devil-may-care attitude, carelessness painted evidently on his face, Credo strode by the security officer, hoping that sheer cheek would assure him safe passage.

It didn't.

The officer stood stock still, at least until Credo passed him. He then lashed out, grabbing the poor man by his shirt and slammed him hard on the ceramic floor.

"Who 're ye and whadda' ye want?

Credo managed to gasp out a barely intelligible answer, despite the fact that his windpipe was nearly crushed and that his tunic had snapped in several stitches.

"Ahem, my name is Engineer 2B-831, or at least it used to be…"

The man's iron grip slackened somewhat, lifting Credo to his feet and brushed the dust from his clothes.

"Aye, Chairman Adrian warned us that ye might be coming. Wouldn't ye know it, he gave ye all access permissions! Don't know why, ye look like a skinny little rat yerself!"

The bear of a man erupted in a great belly laugh, clapping Credo on the shoulder hard enough that he feared for his bones. Credo giggled along nervously and passed through the gigantic door as quickly as possible, relieved to be as far away from the brutish man as possible.

"If we let this opportunity slide by, we may never have one like this again!" bellowed Chairman Adrian.

Credo's entrance had not gone by unnoticed. When the members within the small conference room saw him, conversations became hushed whispers and arguments simmered down to naught.

"Hail and well met, Engineer. We were merely discussing future prospects in which you may invariably play a part in."

"Engineer no longer, Chairman. I am known as Credo now. My mind has been cleared and my path is obvious. What prospects do you speak of?"

"What we speak of is the final act of defiance we will ever pose to Asyle. Sit, stay, we need to talk."

Credo took his place between Adrian and the cheerful orderly who had tended to him only hours before. The Chairman took a plastic marker and began scribbling on what Credo recognized as a crude map of his previous home.

"Gentlemen, ladies," he began with a haughty tone, "how long have we suffered the barbs and bullets of our neighbors? How long have we lived under a perpetual cloud of fear, fear for our children, fear for our own lives? Our very existence is at the stake of the game, a game which Asyle has rigged for years, nay, centuries! While we live like rats, scrabbling for food and clean water, the Asylians, may their names be cursed, have ruled the region, controlling all wells and land, denying us the sole heritage we have retained! Gentlemen, it is time for us to take back what is ours, take back our life, take back our freedom!"

For the next fifteen minutes, the orator outlined all aspects of his plans, using charisma as filler for the flaws he hid away. The operation was simple, as good plans usually were. Using Credo as live testimony, Chairman Adrian delivered with great gusto his wishes for a task force of specialists to enter the Asylian territory, infiltrate the city and unload a payload in the massive temperature control ducts of the great metropolis.

"Your baggage? A strain of mutated influenza, potent enough to be carried airborne throughout the city. Our friends down in the laboratories have effectuated several scenarios, I assure you, and we have ascertained that the virus would be spread out in less than four hours. Gentlemen, this is our time to rise up against tyranny, to take a bold step where none has ever been taken!"

"I will come with you," Credo declared above the hubbub.

Suddenly, it seemed that all life was drained from the room. The chamber became deathly silent ad heads turned to face this new arrival.

"I will come with you," Credo repeated.

"What, why?" demanded Adrian.

"All my life, those people have sucked the very life from me, corrupting my soul with poisons, turning my mind against itself! Damn it all to hell, they took my wife from me!"

"You are not the only one," the chipper young attendant declared in a mournful voice, his face a mask of grief, "my mother and brother were killed only a few days before, on the raid on these very headquarters. Do not presume that you are the only one to have ever suffered from the hands of the Asylians."

Credo was rendered speechless by that softly spoken statement. Seated around him were men and women whose entire lives had been marred by the presence of Asyle, people whose families were splintered and chipped by the tyranny of men who believed themselves to be above the common individual. These people, Credo felt, would lay their lives down gratefully to even have a chance to bring that order crashing down.

"So, when do we start?"

The word was given: Asyle would fall in two weeks. Preparations were to be made, bodies rested, goodbyes exchanged. After the meeting, when members were filtering out the doors, Adrian hooked Credo by the shoulder, drawing him close by.

"Credo, I realize that you very much want to participate, far be it for me to stop you in this, But if you are to accompany us in this, you are going to have to listen to my orders, each and every one. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Even if such orders include "go back", "stop" or "leave him"?"

Credo thought that question out for a while, disciplining his inner feelings with controlled reason.

"Yes sir, I will."

Adrian smile, the type of grin an eager father would give to his son.

"Good, now go outside, head for Range 4, we need to get you into shape."

Range 4 was a cramped little alcove, couldn't have been more than 5 meters in width, that seemed to stretch on forever, though in reality, at the very end of the gallery was a grid of steel mesh, resistant enough to stop a projectile.

Credo entered the room to be deafened by a series of rapid bangs, coming from the hands of a massive figure stationed in front of him. The dark silhouette, painted on a sheet of paper, was attached to a pulley system that was rigged to project the target farther and farther away. The man pulled on the rope, reeling in the dark outline that now was adorned with five holes neatly blown into his center.

Pulling back the slide on what Credo recognized was a gun, the man ejected the five spent cartridges, the light tink of their hitting the floor echoing of the rounded ceilings of the complex.

"The hell do you want?" he asked in a gruff tone, not bothering to turn around.

"Erm, well, Chairman Adrian sent me. He said you'd be able to help me get…err…formal training…"

The bear of a man turned on his heel, exposing a badly scarred face distorted by a single jagged line running from the tip of his left eye to the bottom of his chin.

"Did he now? Did he tell you that I don't like to be bothered by the likes of you? Did he tell you that I've got enough problems on my own, without having yours heaped on me? Well, did he?"

"Well, no…but I thought…"

"Well you thought wrong!" the man bellowed, his stentorian roar reverberating off the curved walls to be amplified in poor Credo's ears.

The man buried his face in his hands, rubbed those gigantic paws all over his visage and breathed out slowly. Suddenly, he tossed his weapon over to Credo, chuckling as the scrawny Engineer scrambled to catch it, only to drop it moments later.

"Here, take a shot, let's see what you're made of."

"But, didn't you just say…"

"Well, if the Chairman says you're here to get training, then you're going to get it."

He clipped on a fresh target on the line, hauling it to four meters away.

"Go."

Credo has never fired a weapon in his life, save for the flare launchers he'd barely used, and the beacon propellers he'd only ever seen in action.

"Well, err, here I go."

His first try failed, earning him a stiff jibe from the instructor for failing to remove the safety lever. His second missed the target completely, Credo being too stunned by the noise to pay any attention. The third, fourth and fifth slammed into the walls below, above and besides the target.

"Breathe in while aiming, breathe out while shooting," his teacher chanted on the sidelines.

Credo grasped the grip of the weapon tightly, his hands covering the solid handle of the small firearm. He focused on one spot on the silhouette, a patch between both arms, his entire attention consumed with the desire to reach out and destroy that patch. He breathed in, pressed the trigger and…

Blam!

The barrel of the weapon erupted with smoke, the bullet whizzing out at vertiginous speeds to slam in the target, leaving a small circular hole rimmed with black in the white portion of the target, only a few inches from the desired location.

"I got it, I got it!" Credo screeched.

"That wouldn't stop anyone from reaching you. That wouldn't even scare them. Do it again."

And he did.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Credo spent all of his free time in Range 4, under the supervision of Gunny, the master-at-arms of the complex. Hours melted away in the stuffy little area, with Credo always emerging stinking of gunpowder and sweat, but utterly exhilarated. He was a quick pupil, inquisitive and bright. Small-caliber firearms gave way to powerful handguns whose recoil first surprised Credo. Handguns shifted to reveal automatic weapons, things that Credo despised as they were horribly inaccurate when the recoil went wild. Credo was no match pitted against Gunny for shot-for-shot firing, but he quickly became one of the very best shooters in the Front, able to lodge a bullet in a hole the diameter of a small bolt.

It was on one such competition that the call for general mobilization came in. Both Credo and his mentor came stomping in the conference room, to find another dozen people already waiting.

"You cheated on that last shot by the way, that round was way off." Credo mentioned.

"Justice is a bitch isn't it? Now quiet."

Chairman Adrian stood behind his pulpit, cleared his throat a few times and flipped over a clean white board, pressing a few buttons near its base in the same gesture. The board lit up, etching dark blue lines that curved and straightened to depict an accurate representation of the Asylian topography.

"Two weeks ago, we met to discuss matters of a grave importance, matters I trust are still fresh in your minds. Tonight, we enact Phase One of our project, Phase One of Operation Meteora."

Credo nearly choked at the mention of that name.

"You people have been specifically chosen for a numbers of things," the Chairman continued, "proficiency with firearms, ability to interact with circuitry or mechanics, sheer physical prowess, the list goes on. Tonight, these skills will be put to the test; will be taxed to their fullest extent to the point where they very well may not recover. Beware, gentlemen, that our entire fate, our existence as a defined people, lies on the success on this mission, on your shoulders themselves."

The man extended a thin metallic wand, circling a specific point on the map in accordance with his speech.

"At precisely three hours past the new day, you will approach Gatehouse 2. Our friend the Engineer still retained his access codes and will prove useful here. You will enter, neutralizing anyone who would compromise the mission objectives. You will make your way in secrecy to Distribution Center Four," he boomed, tapping the square image, "where you will deposit the payload in coolant shafts numbers Two, Three and Four. You will then exit, and make haste, as you will have less than four hours to complete the operation. Might I remind you that the end will justify the means in this. Get some rest people, as you will need it. Good luck."

With these confident words, he strode off the platform, exiting through a door punched into the side of the stage. Such confidence was not shared by the members of the expedition, who gathered in small groups to engage in harshly whispered conversations.

"What did he mean by "the end justifies the means"?" whispered Credo.

"It means that all gloves are off. Do what it takes to finish the mission," replied Gunny.

Indeed, the end justifies the means.

At three hours past midnight, the small crew of fifteen stomped out of the complex, dressed in black fatigues with a vest of shock-absorbent armour hidden underneath their shirts. Credo hauled a duffel bag in which was concealed a sealed metal cylinder containing three glass vials of virus, indeed their deadliest weapon. All of them carried firearms, and all of them knew how to use them. All of them also hoped that they would see no use tonight.

Fifteen meters from Gatehouse Two, they shifted from a packed group of people, molten into the night, to an orderly single file, identical to that of Asylian civilians. Approaching the sliding doors, Credo flipped open the touchpad case, punching in the twenty-digit access code, breathing out a sigh of relief at hearing the large gates, fully five meters tall, pull open. The hiss of air accompanied the covert entry of the fifteen-man team, a hiss that was not so silent.

"Identify yourself, Asylians!" shouted a voice from the top of the stairs, that came with the stumbling of a man rushed to see what the problem was.

A stout guard who had just finished his work shift only lived long enough to see a team of shadows crouching in his post, when one whipped out a silvery object and lodged two bullets in his chest. The projectiles having blasted two holes in his lungs, Security Officer 1J-927 tumbled down the remaining four steps, blood stemming from the dark shapes on his shirt.

"We need to keep moving," Credo said, replacing the suppressed pistol in his belt. The pop pop! of the shots shouldn't have been heard by anyone.

He pushed through the clear glass doors that formed the exit to the gatehouse, emerging in the very end of one of the major boulevards of Asyle. He could barely see anything, but a flow of memories rushed back to Credo from seeing the familiar pale buildings. He gestured at the group, packing himself in a narrow alleyway. He twitched the microphone that relayed him to the rest of the team and moved on, inching himself bit by bit into the core of the city.

"Credo, stop, target at nine o'clock.", his ear told him.

A figure was stomping around the middle of the street, his black overcoat flung wide open for the Moon to reflect off of the heavily-loaded belt.

Damn it…a Cleaner! Bloody hell, we didn't plan for this!

His ear screeching for him to react, his own sense of danger flaring, Credo was deep in turmoil when he fidgeted too loudly. The dark figure only a few meters from him swung around, his cloak billowing around him and unleashed a raking stream of fire, the thunderous drumfire bouncing off the walls of the city. Credo flung himself to the side, uttering a silent curse, reaching for the silenced pistol in his belt. The shooting stopped, Credo safely packed into the shallow alley, counting the seconds that elapsed between the last bullet and the present time.

"By order of the Council of Asyle…"

One…two…

"you and all others like you…"

Three…four…

"are all put under arre-"

Credo fingered a pebble he'd scooped up while in his flight, flipping it with his knuckles. At the count of five, he chucked it towards the incoming figure and squeezed off four shots. Credo knew he'd missed the initial target, dark as the surroundings were, but the cloaked silhouette stopped his monologue and bucked, crumbling like a falling tower.

Credo leaped on the body like a scavenger, quickly dragging him in the quiet safety of the hidden lane. Whipping off the plated helmet, he stuck it on his head, expecting full well the question that crackled out from the integrated radio link:

"Unit four-four-one-nine, report your status. Gunshots were heard, is everything adequate?"

Credo adopted the neutral tone familiar to every inhabitant of this wretched place:

"Affirmative. Misfire due to mechanical defect. I will be bringing my weapon for maintenance at the end of my shift. Over."

The communication link shut off in agreement, leaving Credo to the incoming transmission of his.

"Anything wrong, comrade? We heard fighting."

"Aye, I ran into some unpleasant old friend. Situation under control, no traces left behind."

Credo bent down to examine his handiwork. As expected, several shots had gone astray, slamming into the armoured chest plate of the officer, leaving a sizeable bump and bruised shock plates. But the one that had downed him had struck him in the face, blasting through the outwardly opaque visor, penetrating deep through blood vessels and gray matter to be lodged snugly four inches into his brain. His face was soaked with the sticky wetness Credo knew well by now, so much that the quarter-inch hole under his left eye had barely been noticed by the examiner. But that eye had struck Credo as odd indeed. Caked with rapidly drying blood, the eyelid was absent, instead replaced with a still feebly glowing polymer orb that was still dilating and contracting to accommodate the shifting lights. The other eye seemed to be missing as well, trucked for an undoubtedly superior sighting device.

Credo gingerly removed the bloodied cloak that was quickly gaining colour, determined to uncover more mysteries. The dented impact-resistant vest covered a normal-looking chest, but the hamstrings of the muscled legs were metallic and resilient. The rubber gloves hid articulated claw-like appendages, assuredly several times stronger that Credo's own flesh and bone. The most curious little add-on was a circular plate fitted on the man's neck, directly above his spine, with the visible glass interior still half-full with a yellowish liquid. The same toxin that poisoned the minds of millions, Credo thought, as he remembered the eight killers go stiff and matter-of-course. Probably to compensate for the huge amount of adrenaline…Was Credo even surprised with this? He should've expected it, the utter optimization of the human physique, automating what was deemed deficient.

"We need to move," he calmly spoke into the receiver.

The dark avenues and boulevards of Asyle made perfect cover as each man made his way through the city in pairs, Credo joining up with Gunny minutes later. The sliding door gave way when the proper entry code was tapped in, as smashing it would more than likely lock it. Surprisingly, only two low-level attendants were present in Distribution Center Four, and only two bodies has to be concealed. Their goal in sight, passions were rekindled and haste was made, though one man was lagging behind, the enthusiasm so present in the rest of the force not shared by him. Matthias, the young orderly who had been so kind to Credo in his first days, was not a brutal man, though he had suffered greatly at the hands of the Asylian people. The decision to join the expedition had come lightly, the young man having imagined it as a simple get-out-and-go exercise, one that he had practiced countless times in the scenario room of his home complex. Seeing people murdered up close, hearing their last breaths or the silent puffs of silenced weapons had rattled his conscience, and a conscience was often the best guide a man could have.

The Asylian cooling systems used massive pipes that gathered the used water of the citizens, filtered it and drastically lowered their temperature. The refrigerated liquid was then shot at high speeds through a network of conduits under the grills that formed the citywide roads and lanes. Emerging from the holes punched into the tubes in the form of a fine mist, it refreshed the bodies of those who passed through it, overheated by the heat generated by the bustling crowds. All of these pipes were interconnected and each one had a duct that ended up in one of four massive distribution centers. It took four men the size of giants to unscrew the mechanically tightened lid of such a duct, the crystal-clear water gleaming dully under the dim lamps. Credo coolly unzipped the carrying sack, removing the metallic container. The sight of such a canister stirred something deep within Matthias, causing something to snap. He leaped on the smaller man, wrestling the jug away from him, and stood high on the platform bordering the open duct.

"Comrades, we cannot do such an abomination. Killing innocents is not part of our creed, doing so would only lower us to their level, the level of Asylians."

"They are not innocent, they are Asylians! Do you not grieve for your slain kin?" bellowed a burly man siding the fallen Credo.

"Yes, they are. Corrupted though they may be, they are human, and deserving of mercy and pity."

Meanwhile, Credo was laid out on the floor, dazed by a stray punch launched in the fight. His vision was blurred, but his senses were sharp and his mind alert. The sight of the shiny metal cylinder, cracked open in the ensuing scuffle, caught his tired eye.

The end justifies the means.

The end justifies the means…

Credo snapped open his eyes.

"The end justifies the means," he whispered.

The young man slowly got up and, while Matthias was in the throes of a passionate speech, whipped out the sidearm buckled to his belt and shot twice, the sounds muffled by the heavy suppressor. It was just another training exercise…The bullets collided with the target's chest, blasting through soft flesh to drill a pair of neat holes, only a few inches from each other, into the orderly's heart. Matthias's eyes bulged, his breath came in short, and he collapsed backwards, the glass vials flying from the agape container to smash to pieces inside the water, the infected liquid quickly mixing with the limpid water. The body came tumbling after, scarlet ribbons following his progress down the duct.

Credo ejected the two spent cartridges under the incredulous eyes of the onlookers.

"He was compromised. The mission comes first. I would have expected no less of you had I been in that situation. Quickly now, we must leave. The concentration thrown into a single system will take longer to process, but will strike harder."

The other members of the force shook out of their daze and filed out in a single line, headed straight for Gatehouse Two, which they knew would still be empty.

Credo hooked Gunny by the shoulder, leaning forward to whisper in his ear:

"I have business to take care of here. Don't wait up for me, I'll make my way out of here alone."

Gunny gave him a confused look, then a stiff nod.

It was only around four in the morning. No one would be in the building, save for the night watch of the essential services, Credo knew. And their supervisors.

Credo praised the shoddy bureaucracy that still had Asyle in its grip; his access codes were still valid. The door swung open, revealing an eerily dark corridor lined with feebly glowing tubes. Credo stalked his way across the room, "seeing" with his fingertips, remembering each crag and groove of every piece of furniture. Even in the dim light, Credo read off the plaque that had bound him to his work. "Engineer 2B-831" was still engraved in the plastic table, a new occupant probably already seated in it every day. He inched his way across the various hallways and passages, bypassing known obstacles and sources of noise, until his eyes twitches, locked on to a source of light. A door was ajar, projecting a ray of light from the inside to the outer wall.

Office number 12-G.

He stomped his heel on the black rubber pad, stepping inside the room in one fluid move before the door was finished opening. For inside that room was the man who sent him to his death, the man who both saved and condemned him, for without him, he wouldn't be free.

"You."

The balding man looked up to see the thick cylindrical suppressor pressed to his forehead. Squealing, he backed up, bowling over his chair and stuttering:

"Wh-who are you?"

Credo took a step forward, his weapon still trained to that oh-so tempting target.

"You don't know my name do you?"

The Foreman was in a quandary. If he said yes, the intruder would no doubt ask him the exact moniker, if he said no, Cleaning would have to scrape him off the wall.

"May I remind you th-that you are in a su-superior's officer and that threate-," he whimpered, before hearing his knee crack from a well-placed kick.

"You are not superior, you never were," Credo calmly explained to the weeping man clutching his broken knee.

"I don't even know who you are!" the man exclaimed through a series of sobs.

Credo pounced on him, grabbing his tunic collar and pushing him against the very window that had first greeted him on his first visit.

"Listen up, you sniveling little worm. I know who you are, I know what you've done! You ruined my life! I should kill you right here and now!"

His finger barely twitched on the steel trigger, sending a pointed piece of lead flying from the mouth of his gun.

"And yet I cannot."

Credo stood there, his weapon pointed a few inches from the head of his former supervisor, a hole cleanly blown into the solid glass of the window behind him.

"No, no you can't!" affirmed the man, bolstered by Credo's lack of will.

"I can't kill you, because that would make me just as bad as you."

"Yes, yes that's right," agreed the pitiful little caricature, happy to take a blow to his pride in exchange for his life.

"Yes, yes, you're a model Citizen, a true Asylian!" the Foreman announced.

A model Citizen. A true Asylian.

A true Asylian.

Credo roared with rage, lashing out with his left leg, his foot connecting solidly with the older man's flabby chest, lifting him several inches into the air, straight into the window.

The glass, weakened by the structural loss in integrity, shattered to pieces when the added weight was driven into it, smashing it to shards that sliced through skin with ease. His back and face lined with blood, the Foreman was propelled several feet outside the building, until he began his downwards descent, ending with a sickly crunch when he impacted with the pavement, thirty meters below.

His job finished, a satisfied smirk painted on his face, Credo holstered the firearm and strode off, his conscience clear.

Good thing his comrades had left the gatehouse door open, that thoughtful gestured had saved him precious minutes to get out. The disease was now rife in the streets, Credo knew, the designated four hours having been stretched out for longer than expected. He wandered around the crater that had still not been patched up, locating the boulder that had ironically saved him from the blast and pushed it slightly, shifting the pulleys that had cleverly been driven into the stone's bottom and revealing the hidden entrance to the complex.

The atmosphere below was one of great joy and relief. No longer would the Asylians stalk them, they could finally grow, prosper in peace! Adrian grabbed the descending Credo in a great hug, embracing him with a strength that belied his tired state. He'd stayed up for hours, waiting to get word of the new arrivals, coordinating the project, Operation Meteora, from a safe distance, relayed to the other members by the same radio link hat had warned Credo of the incoming danger hours before.

"Greetings, Hero of our People! You have done a great thing today. You have liberated our kind from the oppression of others who would seek to destroy us. The unfortunate loss of one of our own is a shame, yes, but in the end, the means were justified."

"I must speak with you, in private," Credo murmured.

"Of course. My office is empty," said the enthusiastic Chairman, leading him with flourishing gestures. They passed along the way cheering members of the expedition, and others who slammed them on the back in congratulations.

Chairman Adrian's office was small, yet distinguished, with carvings liberally spread across the room, in shelves, in walls, in the very chair in which he sat. Credo grabbed a straight-backed, polymer stool and plopped down on it, expiring heavily, toying with the microphone that was still plugged into the system.

"Now, then, my friend, what did you want to tell me?" asked the Chairman.

Credo eyed the closing door with attention and slowly declared:

"I believe that what we did may have been flawed. Our people were not trained enough for such an operation and one was compromised. Why were we sent out so early? We could have had more time to ready ourselves, more in mind than in body. This could have spared us some lives and some danger."

"Why do you ask me this now? The operation is finished and accounted for, the objectives complete."

"I wish to clear my conscience."

"This time was needed. The virus we'd synthesized was getting contaminated and could not survive much longer. It was beginning to eat away at their containers, and one strain ever managed to escape."

That was it, Credo thought. Relishing the move, he lightly coughed, covering his mouth and at the same time, flipping on the receiver that was still online with the main intercom system.

"So you knowingly exposed your people to deadly chemicals?" Credo exclaimed in a theatrical exaggeration.

"Don't be such a sensitive fool, Credo. You are too bright for your own good."

"But, people may still be contaminated, they could spread the disease!"

"No, they won't. They were…taken care of."

"You mean, you murdered them."

"Ah, my friend, you dig too deeply in things that do not concern you. Now be off with you, I have work waiting for me."

"One last thing, what will happen to the people who disagreed with this move? I mean, there were some people who were not so inclined to partake of this movement."

"They'll be persuaded, or they will be disposed of. Now leave, I really must be getting back to work."

Credo, slowly got up, letting his chair scrape against the floor for dramatic effect; he had to please his listeners after all.

"Chairman Adrian, under the consent and popular vote of all parties present in this complex, you are hereby charged with the crimes of murder, perjury, knowingly endangering civilians to dangerous products and treason. All of these are capital crimes. It is of the common opinion and of the assent of the law that justice must be served."

The Chairman gave a nervous chuckle and swatted at Credo, who grabbed his hand and twisted, slamming the older man on his table.

"How do you plead?"

Credo squeezed, taking solace in the crunch of breaking bone.

"Guilty as charged," Credo hissed out, smiling.

He drew his pistol, cocked it using one hand and set the bare muzzle directly on the Chairman's forehead. It took all of his willpower not to laugh as he pressed the trigger, blasting a hole through bone, flesh and plastic as the carpet below was stained red with blood and brains. The sharp crack of the explosion had been planned, Credo having unscrewed the suppressor before his "meeting". He'd always been one for drama.

He passed his hand through his hair, ruffling it to make it look as if he'd been in a struggle, dipping a finger in the Chairman's fresh blood to highlight the cuts and bruises he'd received during Operation Meteora. He strode out of the office, weapon still in hand, stumbling around as if the task had taxed him to the very edge of his life. People lined up in droves, packed in groups around the intercoms that had delivered the surprise broadcast, eyes glued to the still-smoking weapon loosely held in Credo's hand.

"Let's hear it for Credo, new Chairman of our people!" one man screamed, breaking the deathly silence that permeated the room.

The entire complex erupted in cheers, some nervous, some simply relieved that the entire episode was behind them. Mobs encircled Credo, shaking his hands, raising him high up on their shoulders.

"What is all this?" asked Credo, knowing full well the answer, having researched it extensively beforehand.

"You uncovered a plot that could have ruined our people's existence, by popular decree, you are fit to be our leader, Chairman Credo," proudly declared the man who had exclaimed the initial statement.

The noise abated when Credo raised his hands in pause, the people carrying him like a banner carefully lowering him down to his feet.

"Men, women, my people. I was not born here; I was not even one of you until two weeks ago, when I discovered the horrible truth that is reality. I discovered that Asyle was not all that it seemed, that a monsters was too deeply shrouded in tradition and deceit that its victims did not uncover it. I am proud to be free today, proud to be one of you, proud…to be happier than I have ever been!" he ended with a flourish, raising his arms as if to catch the applause and cheers that serenaded his eloquent speech.

"What of Asyle, Comrade Chairman?" asked the young man who'd aided him in his ascent.

"Let them rot in the pit of their own mistakes, let the Council, let the Masters, let the Priors, let the whole institution be locked away in the Cathedral, too afraid to come out for fear of dying of the plague, for it would seem a fitting punishment to their heinous deeds. For this is just, and it is fair. No one is to approach the city for three hundred days; we must let the disease be washed off of the walls by the rain and elements. We will take delight at seeing the buildings, the very spirit of Asyle crumble with time, and with this, we will rise above them, for we are the superior people, as we are free."

The young man bowed his head, impressed by the young Chairman's benevolence and wisdom, departing with a swift:

"Yes Comrade Chairman, your will shall be done."

Credo stopped him with a bark, hooking him back:

"No, not Comrade Chairman."

Credo looked him in the eyes and for the first time, the man noticed something in his Chairman's eyes, a strange glow, a look of feral hunger and concealed anger.

"Call me Father."

46

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