“So, My Queen, what wonderful stuff do you have for me to do today?”

The fact I actually stopped by the office instead of just calling him up didn’t get any more response out of him than anything else. Such a master of the unflappable, as immovable as his mustache.

“Jobs in the Underspire.” He reached over, liberated six different files, slapped them down on his desk in front of me. “Pick the one you would like to do first. Consider it your test to keep your Level Two Rating.”

“Okie-dokey.” His eyes flicked at the odd term, but he continued working on his computer, while I picked up the folders, old flimsy, shook my head, and scanned through them quickly.

Jeez. Sentient rat swarm. A predatory ooze creature around the algae vats. Tracking and charting the spideroid infestation. A missing Termite. A missing work crew near The Hole. Probably Morlocks tapping the powergrid. Rumors of things coming up out of the Sunken Sea.

“This looks like the work crew and the missing Termite might be related... maybe not.” Huh. Near the Hole and everything. “They’re both near the Hole. I’ll take ‘em and see if there’s a connection, howzabout?”

He grunted his enthusiastic assent to my overwork. Must not have been a huge amount of competition for these jobs, strange.

The fact that finding out what happened to a Termite, and fairly recently, was one of them, verified my faith in My Queen. Just getting the job done and taking care of his living employees.

“Can I get approval to order some more stuff with my dop bonus money and stuff?” I asked archly.

He looked at me. “Before or after.”

“Order it, I’ll pick it up when done,” I assured him.

“What are you looking for.”

“Well, I need seven additional psi-crystal-worthy geodes, some generic crystal-crafting matrix geodes, a set of the appropriate tools... oh, and a laenwork printer, shaper, and actuator, if possible?

“Which reminds me that I need an ammunition maker, too. Slugthrowers are best for a Sun Strike.”

“I will see what I can do. Those are restricted items.”

“I’ll make some ammo for you,” I winked at him. “These two.” I shoved the missing Termite and work crew to one side. “Code me up, dump the files on me, and I’ll be off!”

He just glanced at me, summing up my condition and equipment, and not saying anything else.

My Band beeped. I was off!

-----------------

There’s Crownspire, high-tech fairyland where the obscenely wealthy well-born dwell, generally noble merchant clans who control off-world trade routes, the keys to the stars. That’s the crown of the Central Spire of Janus Prime, reaching way up there to the space elevator controlled by the City Lord, the most powerful sot on the planet. Of the Planet. The Emperor’s Own Knights and Cutthroats would claim something else.

Upspire is where wealthy commoners, powerful government officials, and minor noble houses of this world held power, generally controlling great businesses, resources, factories, or work forces, their cash boxes filled by the High Houses. They were still fantastically rich by any standard, but don’t have the multi-world and multi-city power of the High Houses.

Midspire was your better educated workers, usually white-collar, with education or skills that were in demand.

Downspire is where the poor labor force dwelled, but since there’s a massive demand for manpower, they aren’t out and out destitute. Well, mostly. They are treated like a resource, and not having all the nice stuff that exists in Upspire breeds some ferocious class resentment, which often spills over into lots of violence as they rail against the system.

All of this was built overtop of Underspire.

Janus Prime was a mega-city thousands of years old, its roots sunken way, way down into the mantle. Early mines became foundations for expansions of a workzone into a city, drilling deep into the mantle as machinery for the establishment of a true colony city was set in place, and things grew and grew and grew with time, layer on layer rising, ever rising, while down below, everything remained.

Including a whole lot of people.

Bulk processing of massive scale went on down there, factories occupying cubic miles of space and employing uncounted millions of people. Some lived in Downspire and could see the sky, far, far overhead between the bloks. Millions upon millions of others lived and died in the darkness of Underspire, their only ceilings durasteel and plascrete, and the eternal rumble of machinery they didn’t understand.

Welcome to the future. It’s a bright shiny place.

Granted, this dystopia wasn’t made completely by human decision, but they sure helped. The planet was a shithole before humanity ever got here, according to the histories, so at least they hadn’t freaking ruined a world in pursuit of power. Even the alkalis in the winds had value, and so the dust coming off the swirls on the dome was actually worth harvesting. It was a world definitely not friendly to humans, but it had resources, a lot of them, and so it was being mined for them.

The divisions between classes, well, that incited class conflict, and the Warp Gods loved conflict of any kind.

There were, naturally enough, four major divisions among the noble houses.

The first faction was the Traditionalists, those who relied on the power of science and technology. The nobles were cyberlinked, and made use of computers, power armor, and moderate implant use. Their servants were often full-on cyborgs and bot-brains, wielding the power of technology and force of arms to defy their opponents. Naturally, they had excellent relations with the Mekkers.

The second faction was the Inheritors, those families that relied on psionic mastery to maintain their status and power. Divination, psionic production, and the like were their domains, operating on the edge of human power. They generally had excellent governmental relationships, having close ties with the Mentats, Umbrans, and Coronals.

The third faction was the Ascendents, who operated on a paradigm of human evolution. Gene-splicing, genegineering, biosciences, and ‘unlocking genetic potential’ was their big thing, and they were responsible for the many varieties of humans living on a variety of worlds, and the addition of a lot of extra stuff into the human genome over time. Pretty much every variant human race, from Spacers to High-G types, came about from them, and as a result, they had good relations with all of them.

The last was the Purists, who were staunch humanists, tended to be rather conservative fanatics philosophically, and whose power was based on control of labor forces and average workers. They didn’t have the advanced tech of the other factions, save for some spectacular power armor they were always trying to improve, but their influence over the Cult of Humanity was extreme, and they sank their claws deep into the government bureaucracy. They basically didn’t really trust any of the other factions, all of whom had strayed too far from humanity’s roots, were too susceptible to Warp Influence, and perverted the beliefs and intentions of great Tellus.

And all these beliefs trickled down into the Undercity.

The Undercity had its noble houses, too. Or, to be more precise, its triads, syndicates, gangs, mobs, mafias, yakuzas, cartels, and what-have-you. The underworld was run by those who didn’t really care too much about the law, having their own codes and mores they lived by, and as long as the job got done without harm to Those Above, that was perfectly fine.

So, yes, Underspire was run by the criminal underworld.

Oh, there was imperial oversight, but it was limited. If a Coronal or Umbran came Down Under, nobody was going to defy them unless they wanted their house/gang/syndicate obliterated. Too, the crooks had to have at least some operative framework to live and work around, or they would just wind up in chaos.

But outside that, well, the soylent vats got a lot of business from Underspire.

Of course, it didn’t stop there, because why not make a bigger fucking mess out of a bad situation?

There were Morlock tribes, living ‘wild’ in the metal architecture of the underzone. There were creatures of this hellhole world that got inside and found it much friendlier and easier to get along, with lots of easy food around. There were rogue gangs and nomad tribes living in the underways, occasionally connecting to places outside the city, and way too frequently Warp-crazed and looking to have fun. Psychic fluxes, freak accidents, and sporadic violent combat were just some of the everyday occurrences going on down here, like casual background to a life entombed under mountains of durasteel.

And I was going into this mess, which was basically just as dangerous as living in a Condemned Zone in Downspire.

It sounded like fun!

-----------

Downloaded to my Band were travel files to Underspire, delineating a section of the foundational architecture in the area I was moving into, how to get there, where to go, and what to do.

I noticed that those files hadn’t been updated for the last century, and also noteworthy was that they couldn’t be downloaded or copied or anything, and would automatically wipe once I was no longer in that zone.

In other words, creating an overall map of the Underspires was meant to be very, very difficult. If you couldn’t memorize the place, you were either at the mercy of outdated maps, or lost.

However, ol’ Sama had a Visual File. Without much ado I scanned through everything and memorized it, bypassing the locked software, and suddenly became an expert from a century ago on this particular stretch of subterranean areas.

Needless to say, the Underspires severely messed up communications, even most telepathic ones. Numberless hordes of people had lived and died down here, their thoughts and emotions seeping into the metal and staining it deep with psychic residues. Normal coms have very limited ranges trying to deal with all the metal and rock in the way, and there was a large amount of psychic static, even to telepathy.

However, my Marks bypassed all that, operating on a different wavelength as they did, so I had no problem checking up on my students and directing them hither and yon. So, even if I was down here for a while, I wasn’t out of contact.