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CHAPTER ONE
The walls spun. His tired limbs buzzed with numbness, curled up on a lumpy, thin mattress. Not for the first time, it took him a few long breaths to remember that he lay within a metal sphere.
Computerized beeping heralded the awakening of the room. Low yellow lights illuminated exhausted eyes.
The cell—he remembered easily that this room was a cell—was a near-perfectly spherical structure about fifteen feet in diameter. Just enough room for one.
A bruise lit up in his left arm, above his wrist, as he sat up with difficulty. The thick, cold walls stared back at him in their deep copper brown shade. Seams in the curved panels spilled out tiny quantities of thick, lumpy black oil, like bits of food residue stuck on a dinner-mate’s lips.
With an aching groan, he slipped off the mattress. The floor chilled his bare feet to the touch with a cold so intense, he had to imagine it originated from miles and miles deep underground, where no sun shone at all. Perhaps where no sun had ever shone.
There was a single, sleight, dusty window in the door of the cell, and beyond it was a dim hallway stretching left and right to places unseen. That door, of course, had no handle on this side. Near where a handle might have been was a slot shut as tightly as anything. In just a few minutes, he expected, a guard would pass by to slip breakfast through that slot.
He felt the urge to urinate and turned to the one other door in the room: a shorter door beyond which opened to the most compact toilet room that had probably ever been constructed by mankind. He pressed a button beside the door and watched the metal sheet slide open for him. A white plastic area—it would be ridiculous to call it a “room”—lay behind with just barely enough space for a person his size to fit inside, seated snugly against the contour of the cell.
Why did they allow one to close the door, he had to wonder, when they had decided to stick a camera inside anyway? Perhaps these rooms had not always been intended for their current occupants.
Regrettably, Montgomery Noa was that current occupant. And as he opened up his filthy greenish-gray jumpsuit and enclosed himself in the diminutive water closet he felt the realization rushing upon him, like a cold tide, that he’d been a prisoner of war for over a month now, by his count. Perhaps that would earn him a medal upon his return. It was easy, automatic really, to speculate about that sort of thing.
The water closet lit up with a single green light, and a metal helmet-like device popped out from the ceiling and slowly clamped down over his head and face. (An alarming experience if one wasn’t used to it.) He remained still as a dreamer as tubes spat shaving foam onto his face and the razors swept over his chin to trim his stubble and along his cranium to shorten his brown hair. It was great gasping relief when it retracted back into the ceiling.
His body ached, most especially his left arm, which still had not healed fully from when he’d been captured.
No, more recent than that. When he’d been tortured.
He’d been separated from his troop in late February. He knew that because he remembered that this part of the world—the heart of Greater Europa, one of the Conglomerate Nations—had begun to emerge from the long winter. It had to be at least a month now since February’s end. It was late March or the beginning of April.
With a groan and then a long yawn he exited the water closet and stretched his limbs, striking life and feeling into them.
He glanced around and, able to avoid it no longer, saw the thing he wanted to see least in the world.
Considering its dominant presence, he was only able to avoid spotting it for so long through numerous days of practice. There would have been relatively ample room to move about in this cell if not for it—the massive console dominating the center of the place. A large machine the same dark coppery color as the walls and shaped a bit like a large telescope, the kind stored in observatories that dwarfed the human body, only its size was such that it fit inside the spherical cell perfectly and was built into the floor and ceiling.
Unlike a telescope, however, the machine was tilted such that it was thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top. At the ceiling the thinner end of the console’s thick, metal body stuck up into a mass of black accordion rubber. The only connection the console had to the floor of the cell was a metal column no more than three or four inches in diameter that attached to the machine’s thicker, lower end. That lower section of the console was hollow: it would open up like a huge capsule waiting to be filled.
The console…the Soulcage…was open now.
Montgomery’s eyes lit up as he thought about how the Soulcage had not been open for nearly a week now.
Today. Today was the day.
He stepped up to the hollow, open section just barely low enough for him to look inside. A cushioned seat lay against the lower cavity, angled to face up with the telescopic tilt of the console. One would sit almost upside-down, like the pilot of a rocket ship. Waiting there for takeoff.
He wasn’t sure he was ready yet to go to where the Soulcage would take him.
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