James Axler – Exile to Hell

Like me, Kane thought.

Within an hour, the black sky mellowed to a pale indigo at the horizon. The comforting lights of Cobaltville beckoned, and he couldn’t help but be glad of his return. He desperately wanted to shuck off his armor and wash away the bitter stink of the hellzone.

The Deathbirds soared steadily over the irrigated greenness of cultivated fields and over the silvery windings of the Kanab River, a tributary of the Colorado.

Kane looked down at the city spread below. Cobaltville was built on the bluffs overlooking the river. Towers and walls perched on the hills, looking like a gargantuan battleship somehow beached there. The stone walls rose fifty feet high, and at each intersecting corner protruded a Vulcan-Phalanx gun tower. Powerful spotlights washed the immediate area outside the walls, leaving nothing hidden from the glare. The bluffs surrounding the walls were kept cleared of vegetation except grass, a precaution against a surprise attack. One of the official reasons for fortifying the villes was a century-old fearor paranoid delusionof a foreign invasion from other nuke-scarred nations. It had never happened, and Kane had always wondered how the barons figured any country could mount a large enough army to establish anything other than a remote beachhead.

Then there had been the threat of mutant clans, like the vicious stickies, unifying and sweeping across the country. Legend spoke of a charismatic leader who had united the mutie marauders to wage a holy war against the norms. As far as Kane recollected, the war hadn’t quite come off, but the memory of the threat was burned deep in the collective minds of the baronial hierarchies. It had burned so brightly that a major early aspect of the Program of Unification had been a campaign of genocide against mutie settlements in ville territories.

Inside the walls stretched the complex of spired Enclaves. Each of the four towers was joined to the others by pedestrian bridges. Few of the windows in the towers showed any light, so there was little to indicate that the interconnecting network of stone columns, enclosed walkways, shops and promenades was where nearly four thousand people made their homes.

In the Enclaves, the people who worked for the ville administrators enjoyed lavish apartments. Every comfort was built into themplumbing, artificial lighting, refrigeration, air-conditioningall the bounty of those favored by the baron. Kane and a few other Magistrates lived in the upper levels of the Enclaves.

Far below the Enclaves, on a sublevel beneath the bluffs, light peeped up from dark streets of the Tartarus Pits. Though it was very late, the Pits were awake and seething. The narrow, twisting streets were crowded, neon light flashed luridly, making blacker the shadows of the alleys and lanes. These sectors of the villes were melting pots, where outlanders and slaggers lived. They swarmed with the cheap labor, and random movement between the Enclaves and Pit was tightly controlledonly a Magistrate on official business could enter the Pits, and only a Pit dweller with a legitimate work order could even approach the cellar of an Enclave tower. However, Kane knew of at least one undetected route into the Enclaves.

The population of the Pits was as strictly and even more ruthlessly controlled than the traffic. The barons had decreed that the villes could support no more than five thousand residents, and the number of Pit dwellers could not exceed one thousand.

Kane retained vivid memories of making Pit sweeps, seeking out unauthorized outlanders, infants and even pregnant women. He did not relish those memories.

Seen from above, the Enclave towers formed a latticework of intersected circles, all connected to the center of the circle, from which rose the Administrative Monolith. The massive, round column of white rockcrete jutted three hundred feet into the sky. Light poured out of the slit-shaped windows on each level.

Every level of the tower was designed to fulfill a specific capacity E, or Epsilon, Level was a general construction and manufacturing facility; D, or Delta, Level was devoted to the preservation, preparation and distribution of food; and C, or Cappa, from an American version of the Greek Kappa, Level held the Magistrate Division. On B, or Beta, Level was the historical archives, a combination of library, museum and computer center. The level was stocked with almost five hundred thousand books, discovered and restored over the past ninety years, not to mention an incredibly varied array of predark artifacts.