James Axler – Exile to Hell

The doors shut behind him, and as he expected, he saw nothing but a deep, almost primal dark. Not black, because he could still make out dim shapes, but a dark that seemed soul deep, extending into an infinite void. Salvo kept walking forward, knowing where he was going. The baron’s level was the only one in the monolith without windows, and though he burned a great deal of electricity in the foyer, he always kept his living quarters a few shades lighter than obsidian.

One room led to another, through a wide, low arch. The succession of rooms went on, and Salvo always started to feel as though the rooms would never end, with yet one more lying beyond, then another, all illuminated by the gray glow from an unseen light source. But in the fifth and final room, Salvo stopped.

Eight men stood in a formal semicircle in the center of the enormous Persian carpet that covered the floor. Several of the group were administrative members of the Magistrate Division, one was a high-ranking archivist and four were of Baron Cobalt’s personal staff. Though he knew all of their names, he didn’t know them personally.

Salvo managed to keep the surprise he felt from showing on his face. At most, he had expected two, maybe three of the baron’s staff to be present. He had no idea that the entire membership of the Trust had been summoned. Suddenly the reason for his audience with the baron was much more important than simply delivering a report about the Mesa Verde penetration.

None of the men spoke to him, nor did he speak to them. A meeting of the Trust was neither the time nor the place for social niceties. Every ville had its own version of the Trust. The organization, if it could be called that, was the only face-to-face contact allowed with the barons, and the barons were the only contacts permitted by the Archon Directorate.

The mission of the Trust revolved around a single themethe presence of the Directorate must not be revealed to humanity. If their presence became known, if the technological marvels they had designed became accessible, if the Directorate’s history filtered down to the people, then potentially the Directorate would be forced to visit another holocaust upon the face of the earth, simply as a measure of self-preservation.

And that capability was there, Salvo had been told upon his induction into the Trust. To prevent another apocalypse, maintaining the secrecy of the Directorate and their work was a sacred trust. It was a sworn and solemn duty, offered to very few.

Unfortunately, no secret as complex and as wide-ranging as this one could be completely hidden. Rumors abounded about the Directorate and the Totality Concept even before the nukecaust, though they were relegated to the status of urban legends or contagious paranoia. During the century and a half following the skydark, some of the secrets were discovered. Humanity, what was left of it, was too scattered even for the Directorate to control. The near annihilation of the race hadn’t diminished the race’s inborn sense of curiosity, the drive to search in strange places for strange things.

Many of those strange places were penetrated, the strange things uncovered, but humankind was too concerned with day-to-day survival to reason out the why’s and wherefore’s behind them. It required only a generation to reduce the knowledge of strange places and things to mere rumors, and another generation to fanciful legends.

Salvo recalled that some thirty years before, a junior archivist in Ragnarville had found an old computer disk purporting to contain the journal of one Mildred Wyeth, a scientist. According to the journal, she had been in suspended animation during the nuking and she had survived the skydark and the long nuclear winter to be revived a century later.

Sometime during her wanderings, she recorded her thoughts, observations and speculations regarding the post-nukecaust world, the redoubts and the wonders they contained.

Although she had no inkling of the true nature of the redoubts or even the presence of the Directorate, a number of her extrapolations came too close to the truth.

The Trust suspected the Wyeth Codex had been downloaded, copied and disseminated like a virus through the Historical Divisions of the entire ville network. There was no solid proof of this, of courseonly anxieties that gave rise to the fear that an elite group of historians/insurgents, labelled Preservationists by the Intel section, might know far more than the Trust or even the barons themselves.