Eight hours later...

My destination was Habberblok, which was about five miles away. As usual, I preferred to skate the distance rather than hop a ride, as I didn’t own a ride yet, paranoia reasons and everything.

There were people walking short distances. Intermediate distances warranted scooters or hoverboards, which had their own lanes of traffic. Ground vehicle traffic was basically restricted to heavier cargo that would weigh down hover transports, and generally adhered strictly to the Traffic Control lines on the roads. If you got run over, it was because you were an idiot and didn’t obey the very clearly posted alerts and alarms, nitwit, so people tended to obey them before a 200-mph hauler zipped on by.

Streets were semi-busy, people out going through their neighborhood groceries, to and from work, gangs posturing on their turf, junkies looking for a fix of the latest or their old reliables, the homeless finding a corner or a new place to rest their head until their time came, the crazies who might just try anything if you looked at them wrong, and suspicious eyes watching from windows and ready to report anything, not that the Juris cared most of the time.

Just life Downspire.

My skating along was an affection, as most people who wanted some speed went with hoverboards and surfed their way along the faster lane. Now, I could go a whole lot faster than I was, but I didn’t like the thought of Traffic Control reaching out to snuff the anti-grav in my board at an inopportune moment... or just as bad, not being able to switch it off and taking some steps to redress the issue by momentarily redirecting a hurtling cargo lifter, or something.

TC had no sympathy for shit intruding in its travel lanes. You wanted to go rogue, TC would clear you out of its lanes as calmly as pulling a trigger at you. They were extremely reliable that way.

Now, the fact that I was skating along barefoot to the sharp-eyed would get some attention, but most of the key locals knew not to mess with me by now. My face-Tat stood out, as did the ears, and I’d only had to maul a few dozen people before those watching wised up and spread the news to their respective tribal parties. Now, they at most waved or nodded as I passed by... if they didn’t slink well back into their alleys.

I thought walking ten miles with a stuffed spideroid abdomen on my back dripping goo would do it, or maybe Cleaning the three idiots ambushing me outside the Termite office, but I did think holding my hand out with the last idiot who’d tried to las me in front of a cargo hauler zipping by so he could kiss the train had been a bit extreme... but, ya know...

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Habberblok was a blok that looked like all the others... a quarter-mile wide edifice of dark grey plascrete reaching two thousand feet into the air, home to hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, and a whole lot of other people, some of whom spent the vast majority of their lives inside, and rarely came out.

There was food, entertainment, schools, shops, and services within, basically everything needed to service a city’s worth of people inside in millennia-old dreary surroundings around the great central plunge that extended from almost the roof-top to the main floor.

Averaged a suicide every other day per blok, I believed. Taking The Plunge was accepted and hardly generated more than a knowing nod from anyone. Murders, now, those could easily happen more frequently. The ‘Red Zone’ where people were encouraged to fall if they jumped or were thrown off was deliberately free of anything but bruised, oft-painted plascrete. Soft kinetic pressor beams coming out of the fountain in the central shaft gently pushed those enthusiastic souls who wanted to see how far they could make it into the middle back towards the edges...

Paid for out of your rent, thank you.

But Habberblok, Habber had something a little special going on...

================

All the Downspire Bloks were set up the exact same way. They were prefabbed, moduled into place, and stacked up with amazing speed. With enough workers, one of these massive things could literally be tractored and pressored into place, piece by piece, within a week. Preprogrammed droids could reel out the wiring connections by the levels, and people assured of their one place to live by the Emperor’s Dole would start moving in the day after.

So, find the main entry; first hallway on the right, halfway down, is the building security station.

In some bloks, this was a place where cybered and stimmed elite retired paramilitary lived out their waning years making sure nothing threatened their breadbasket. In most, it was where a guy came in to put in his time, shoot people who go crazy, organize people if something really bad happens, and mostly ignore the crime and feuds of the gangs and criminals in Downspire, at least if they wanted to keep their heads.

Habberblok wasn’t hard to find. It was kind of unique for the burn scars and trashed windows about the upper floors, which the printer-repair bots had not been able to fix at all despite the passage of time. They were rather unsightly, what with the gaping open windows and everything, and the fact that when normal people looked at it, it looked back at them.

Yeah.

There were no pictures posted of Habberblok on the Boole, because if you looked at the pictures, the pictures looked back at you, and the Mekkers got real twitchy about that kind of stuff on their servers. So, if you visited the default Habberblok site, there wasn’t a picture to be seen. Nor were there ANY active city vids covering it, except at the bottom entry level. Even Traffic Control’s cams were lined up to not include it in any pics, very carefully, and the skyway routes had been carefully redrawn so as not to get too near.

But they couldn’t just shroud it from view. They started on that, and the work crews went nuts, and the construction collapsed onto the areas below. It seemed the ghosts wanted everything to stay as it was.

There was lots of text, though. If you did a search, the politest thing that came up was ‘haunted’.

Inneresting.

It had a Tau Rating, which was way down the Alpha to Omega scale, the latter meaning something that could take out the planet. Tau was basically death to single individuals, and so troublesome to get rid of that it was better to just contain and forget about it.

I looked at my mission. Well, I was there to renew the Tau Rating. Just a walk in, get a thumbprint from the supervisor saying I looked the place over, walk out. Easy credits for nothing, clocking travel time.

Except I was looking at it, and nothing was looking back at me.

Inneresting...

-------

I entered the security station, and knocked on the window.

There was an overweight guy with a failing hairline there behind the security partition, smoking an old stogie that was illegal upspire, but the ventilator right over his head caught most of the smoke, so it didn’t totally stink. They definitely put more than nicotine in those things nowadays...

He put down his flimsy, probably looking over the sport scores, really old-fashioned, didn’t even use a holo from a Band. I didn’t have a problem with it. It was actually easier to read than most holos. I just did a dump into my Visual File and bypassed the whole eyestrain part.

“Hey there, Pops. Government functionary here to get a thumbprint after taking ten minutes of your precious time.”

The flimsy came down, and he stared at me in disapproval, flipped the stogie to a corner of his mouth, and grunted. “What do you need?”

“Termite annual renewal of Tau Rating?” I asked in the same bored tone.

“Emperor’s Nuts. It’s been a year already?” He shook his head, looked me up and down, and kind of snorted. “What kind of Termite are you? Are you even carrying?”

I flicked up my Claws for a moment, and he almost flinched. “Yep, always.”

He grumbled and got to his feet with a sigh. His disruptor was holstered, no stunners in Downspire, and he set the flimsy and his stoogie down with equal care, pinching the latter to extinguish it. “Well, it won’t take long.”

“I got that impression. Care to tell me the story? It’s on blackout on the Boole.”

He grunted again. “Sure.” He slung on his armored vest, don’t leave home without it, and made for the door, regaling me as we walked out of his office and down the connecting corridor.

“Thirty-some years ago, a bunch of cultists moved into the top of the tower quiet-like, and slowly leeched into the minds of every single person in the blok. With that power, they enacted a Ritual, and brought in something from the Warp.

“Well, that brought down the Mentats and Coronals on top, and the Juris on the bottom. In the process, the Ritual killed every single person in the blok and turned them into brainfried, who all had to be slaughtered as they tried to kill the security forces.

“The Coronals got to the heart of the Ritual, and the Mentats made sure the cultists didn’t mindjump away, or so they say. The brainfried fell like puppets with their strings cut, and had to be carted off to the furnaces because of the Warp contamination.” My, the soylent vatters must have complained. That was a lot of wasted soylent material. Yet another reason to hate the Warp!

“Only, their spirits didn’t go away. They are still up there.”

We had stepped into the Plunge of the blok, and he pointed up. Naturally I followed his gesture.

It was a long ways up, and poorly illuminated up there. Filtered light was coming through the city’s dome and the glassteel up above, but a lot of the shaft’s lighting was missing up there. I had decent eyes, so I saw a weird cross brace up there a hundred and fifty stories or so, just steel beams crossing, no walkway or nothing, and the ones higher up seemed to all have been blasted down. Lots of swathes of black or shiny patches on the plascrete, holes, and craters from blast impacts, multiple breaches in the guard rails, looking rather unsightly.

Yeah, I had really good eyes. Patted myself on the mental head.

I brought my eyes back down to his. “Don’t see nothing. What’s this about a Tau rating?”

He stared at me. “You...you don’t see anything?”

I leaned back and looked straight up for a good ten seconds. “Nope. Tau Rating?”

“Ummm.” He was staring at me in disbelief. “Entering floor 159 or higher is a death trap. No one has ever come back alive from there. Even if they take a lift, it comes back empty.

“Supposedly the effect has infected the material of the floors above there, and the space itself. If they chopped it off and tried to rebuild it, they’d still be there.”

“Ohhhhh. Okay. Yeah.” I glanced up knowingly. “And without a material anchor, they could start wandering. If they took the material away, they could go wandering wherever the anchor is, so all they’d do is build another death zone, and a lane of death between them. Wow, that kind of infection would take a thousand cred an hour psion to deal with, and no guarantee that his brains wouldn’t start coming out his ears in minutes. No one would dare to fix the problem, and you can’t get rid of it. So, they left it.” I flapped my lips in disdain. “Well, that’s a Tau Rating, sure enough. It’s just... why the fuck are there still people here?”

It wasn’t as busy as a normal blok, but there were still plenty of people around, more than a few of whom were staring at me in disbelief.

Nobody else was looking up at all, of course.

“Well, the rent here is thirty percent off.” He coughed delicately. “It kind of attracts a weird kind of crowd. As long as you don’t look up, it’s fine, and there’s not been a single case of it spreading below 159 since.”

“Huh. I may move in here!” I wriggled my nose thoughtfully. Thirty percent! Sale, sale, sale! “Ever hear of the Hole in the Deep?”

“Can’t say I have...”

“It’s kind of a taboo subject on some of the fringe boards. Turns out that some time ago, some necromancer went body-fishing on the body feeds to the soylent vats. There was some kind of kerfluffle, and what was left behind was some zone down in the Deep where people go in and none come out...”