Naomi stopped her Core a few meters back from the edge

Naomi stopped her Core a few meters back from the edge. The Layered's central access shaft lay opened before her. There had been a medium force guarding it, a squad of MTs, and a pair of ACs. The ACs had bothered her. Something about them had been… off. Neither of their pilots had tried to say a word, no call of warning when she approached, no taunts as they tried to pin her down, not even a cry of pain when she coated the quad with so much plasmid napalm that it had started to melt where it stood.

She stood there, looking down the shaft for several minutes. She didn't worry about reinforcements arriving. A distraction squad had been sent to a diversionary target to draw them all away and they'd done their job admirably.

The access shaft was dark, the light from the sun above her penetrating only a short way before the shadows overwhelmed it. Save for streamers of smoke rising from ruined machines, the city was still around her. Not even a ghost of a breeze stirred among the small collection of buildings.

The silence bothered her. The buildings around her housed heat exchangers, air processors, water reclamation factories, all the mechanical processes needed to keep the underground city habitable. They should have been throwing up a perfect cacophony, but all were quiet and still.

She liked to think herself beyond fear, beyond feeling. Nothing distracted her from the job at hand. She was merciless, calculating, the perfect Raven when job needed to be accomplished at any cost. That was why she alone had been chosen to infiltrate this new layered, and discover why its inhabitants had created the Silent Line. But it seemed to have no inhabitants. There were no power emanations from within, no signs of life.

She was beyond fear, she told herself angrily. It didn't matter if this was some sort of ambush. She'd been good enough to always survive them before. Before the fear could rise again, she urged her AC forward, stepping out over the lip of the shaft and plunging into the darkness below. She periodically fired her boosters to keep her fall controlled, but it was a long plunge until her scanners finally registered the bottom of the shaft, and she had to drain the Muentoke's capacitor to counter her momentum before she hit the ground.

The Core's external mikes recorded the sound of it hitting the floor. The sound echoed for a long time. The access doors leading to Layered itself were open halfway, wide enough for her Core to fit through. There was no light though, except for what she provided herself. She switched her screens over to IR mode, the tunnel around her leaping into stark black and white contrast.

Muentoke's footsteps were the only sound. She was passing through the guts of the machinery that kept the underground city alive, and the silence was so complete it was funerary. Her stomach felt like it was trying to crawl up into her lungs, and a cold sweat started collecting at the base of her spine, until with a snarl of anger, she smashed her fist into the side of her control console hard enough to tear the skin of her knuckles. This was unbelievable. She was getting scared of nothing. She didn't feel fear on the battlefield when she came with a hairsbreadth of loosing her life, she shouldn't be feeling any now.

There didn't even seem to be any automated defenses active to stop here. Nothing interfered with her progress down the tunnel. It was almost boring.

Then why was her blood stream filling with adrenaline? She was so tense that she had to keep her fingers off of the trigger stubs, or else start spraying fire all over the place. The glaring white and shifting darkness of the IR screen made it seem like there was constant movement amongst the twisting conduits and hulking machinery. Her radar screen said that she was the only active return within range, but she had trouble believing it. There had to be something out there, someone watching, waiting, something terrible and silent.

She tore her knuckles further as she pounded the control console. Raging at herself for suddenly being intimidated by shadows and the dark. If the recon intelligence was correct, she should be approaching one of the residential sectors. There she might be able to find some answers.

The corridor ended in a wide maintenance bay, which itself opened to overlook the city. The space was to vast for her to get any resolution on the IR screens, so she activated the Core's UV floods and short wavelength amplifiers, the city leaping to sudden detail in front of her.

She realized why she was afraid.

A residential sector had the capacity to house three million people with room to spare, and the recon had noted this Layered as having twelve such sectors, with more than enough accompanying industrial sectors to support them all and then some. Thirty-six million people would've called this Layered home, but the city in front of her was dark, still, and utterly silent. It wasn't abandoned, it was something worse.

She couldn't tell if anyone had ever lived here. If the sector had been abandoned, there would've been debris, vehicles, possessions cast aside and left behind. Squatters and looters would've brought so degree of disorder. Every street she saw was absolutely clean and clear. It wasn't just that nothing had been left in disarray, but nothing had been left at all. She couldn't see a single vehicle along the curbs, and not only was there no garbage in the streets, there was nothing. Every street, every building, every window that she could see was intact. There had been no looters, no squatters, it was as if the people that had lived here had swept up after themselves on the way out.

Three million, or thirty-six million, all were gone without a trace. Whatever had happened, there'd been no fighting, no struggle, they were just gone, along with every sign that they'd existed in the first place. The recon teams had reported signs of human habitation, but they had only gone far enough to launch recon MTs, then sat back and waited for them to report in. All of the fragile little drones had, which meant that there was nothing dangerous waiting with the Layered. Or that it was smart and patient enough to wait for bigger pretty to come along.

Her automap was highlighted with the map to where that Layered's controller should have been, a path that lead her right through the middle of the residential sector. Three levels of elevated roadway criss-crossed the sector, allowing her to easily descend to the ground level. The roads were broad, the lane markers bright, the asphalt unmarked.

A side effect of using the UV screens was that everything looked too bright, the image a little too sharp. She could make out the seams in the uniform construction slabs used on all the buildings. She didn't waste time peering into apartment windows, she wasn't sure she wanted to see what was inside. However, as her route took her into the sector's commercial districts it became hard not to notice what lay behind large, display fronts. Ground vehicles, bookshops, food stores, some empty but most with their wares still on display. She was able to avoid looking to hard at most of these, until she passed a fourth floor display window, filled bottom to top with dolls. If it had been lit, it would've been clearly visible from the street below. She tried to look away, to keep going, but seeming of their own volition, her fingers released the throttle. She tried to look away, but her eyes remained locked, growing wide and round as they took in the sight of all of those happy, smiling faces, row after row of eternally joyful expressions.

In the over detail of the UV screen she could see a thick layer of dust furring the skin of the dolls. How long had they remained like that? How long had they sat in the window, staring out into an empty street? How long since they had silently watched while all the people went away?

A shudder shook her body, and then another as the cold touch of realization gripped her heart and squeezed. 無縁仏。Muenbotoke. A corpse with no one to tend the grave. That was the fate her parents had promised her when she'd left them. That was the name she'd given her AC to show it was a fate she didn't fear. She'd thought that she'd understood what it'd really meant, but she hadn't. She'd had no concept of what that word truly embodied. Not until now. The city around her, the entire Layered, that was muenbotoke.

Naomi felt her throat close up, the terror of the darkness, the silence, the nothing pressing down on her too heavily to even breath. Not even the solid shell of her Core could protect her from the knowledge of what it meant that thirty-six million people had become muenbotoke.

She gripped her head in her hand and closed her eyes, trying to forget everything that she'd seen, everything she knew. It'd always been assumed that behind the Silent Line lay something important, valuable. That's why its defenses had been so fierce, to keep people from getting at whatever treasure it concealed.

That was wrong.

All the defenses, the weapons, and the machines, had not been there to prevent people from getting in, but to keep the Silent Line from spreading out.