Chapter 347 - 338 — The Keep Beneath the Mountain I
Floor 33 was a salt flat.
Not sand — salt, white and crusted and cracked into plates the size of doors, with brown water standing in the cracks and a sky that went from horizon to horizon without one thing in it. The crust broke under boots with a sound like biscuit. There was no cover anywhere on that floor and there was nothing to hide behind.
`[FLOOR 33 — STANDARD]`
`[MISSION TYPE: ELIMINATION]`
`[HOSTILE ENTITIES: 34]`
They came out of the water.
That was the whole design of it — the standing brown water in the cracks was deeper than it looked and wide enough underneath to hold something, and the hostiles came up out of the plate-joins in ones and twos at whatever range they liked.
Team Zero solved it in about nine minutes, and the solution was James.
Salt flat, standing water, no masonry anywhere. Fossor had the best ground of its existence. James put it under the plates and simply stopped being surprised — every single time one of them came up, he had known about it for six seconds, and Cillian had a line on the join before it opened.
`[FLOOR 33 CLEARED]`
`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 7,900]`
`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 40,000 PER MEMBER]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 33,885 / 75,000]`
`[FLOOR MVP — JAMES GANNER]`
`[REASON: HOSTILE DETECTION — 31 / 34 ENGAGEMENTS PRE-EMPTED]`
"That’s not fair," said Cillian, on the way out. "That’s a floor built for your mole."
"They can’t all be built for you."
"They should be. I’d clear them faster."
---
Floor 34 was a rain forest with towers in it.
Six control points across four kilometres of triple canopy, and the objective was to hold four of the six for twenty minutes at a time in a rotating pattern the System reassigned every four minutes. It rained the entire way through. Everything was green and black and the ground had no bottom.
That one was not James’s floor at all.
It was Maeve’s, because somebody had to read six points and a rotating assignment while five people ran between them in a forest with eleven metres of visibility, and she did it for fifty minutes without one bad call.
It was also the floor where James finally saw the thing he had been waiting eight months to see.
Ronan held a point for nineteen minutes on his own. Not with support, not with a skeleton — on his own, in a tower doorway, against a number of things nobody bothered to count, because Maeve had put him there and then the rotation had gone somewhere that needed all four of the others. She came back for him with forty seconds on the clock and he was still in the doorway and had not moved a metre in either direction.
"You could have called," she said.
"You’d have come," said Ronan. "Then we’d have lost two."
`[FLOOR 34 CLEARED]`
`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 8,300]`
`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 42,000 PER MEMBER]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 42,185 / 75,000]`
`[FLOOR MVP — MAEVE CALLAHAN]`
---
Both times the broadcast ended before the exit. Both times the Waiting Room gave them their bodies back and did nothing whatsoever for the equipment. Both times Alice was on Earth when they left and on Earth when they got back, because she had a life and it did not involve going up a tower to kill things in a rain forest.
And both times, when they came out, there was a gap of several weeks before anybody suggested the next one.
That was the part that was new.
♢♢♢♢
---
The three months went the way months go when nothing is trying to kill you.
By the end of them, Guild Zero had records.
That was how James measured it in the end, because it was the only honest measure available. In August there had been ten people and a whiteboard. By the middle of November there was a shelf in Ronan’s office with ten assessment folders on it, each one four times the thickness it had started at, and a second shelf beside it for the expedition reports.
The recruits had come off orientation in the second week of September and had started going into the Tower in October.
Not with Team Zero. That had never been the arrangement and nobody had asked for it.
They went in supervised, on the lower floors, in two parties of five with either Ronan or Cillian attached and a member of the ops staff on the broadcast — Floors 4 through 9 to begin with, which four of them had already cleared years ago with other guilds and which they now had to clear again as a unit, because clearing a floor and clearing it *with these four other people* were different things and Ronan had refused to accept anything else.
The first expedition went badly. Cillian’s report ran to six pages and used the word *shambles* twice.
The fourth one did not.
By November the two parties had a shape. Not Team Zero’s shape — they were not going to have Team Zero’s shape for years, and Ronan had said so to their faces in week one — but a shape. Team One’s caller stopped asking and started telling. The woman with the green trainers, who had spent September chasing every opening in front of her, spent November holding a rear position and complaining about it, which Cillian recorded as progress.
And they had started doing the thing James found strangest of all, which was arguing with each other about their own floors, in their own briefing room, with the door shut.
---
The building changed around all of it.
The residential wing finished in October, eleven weeks late, and immediately had four people living in it. The second training hall got its floor done. Somebody discovered that the eastern stairwell had been carrying water into the wall since July and there was a fortnight of noise and a bill.
They hired nine more staff. Two screeners, two on operations, a media coordinator Maeve had wanted since the launch, a full-time armourer, and three on training support.
James signed things. That was most of what he did for it — he read what Maeve put in front of him and signed it, and about once a fortnight he asked a question that changed something, and the rest of the time the building simply ran.
He noticed it properly one Thursday in October. He had been out of the country for two days and had come back to find that a guild expedition had gone in, cleared Floor 7, come out, been debriefed, had its equipment logged and its report filed, and that nobody had rung him about any of it.
He stood in the corridor for a moment and then went and got a coffee.
---
He trained the whole three months, four days a week, and did not get a single new thing out of it.
That was not a complaint. What he got was the other kind of progress, which nobody streams.
He learned that Fossor was useless under masonry and excellent under anything that had been dumped rather than built, and spent a lot of November working out the difference by feel. He learned to run four ordinary skeletons on four separate instructions at once without any of them stopping, which he had genuinely not been able to do in August. He learned — from Finn, in the north hall, over about six weeks — that he had been throwing his shoulder into binds instead of his hip for two years.
And in the second week of September he finally spent the five points that had been sitting in a box since Floor 32.
`[FREE STAT POINTS: 5]`
`[ALLOCATE — STRENGTH +5]`
`[CONFIRM?]`
Not Intelligence. He had thought about Intelligence for about a day and then thought about a manticore at a ford, and Finn’s axe going four inches into a hide and stopping, and holding a bind against his own cousin at eight inches with a man’s whole weight coming down on it.
`[STRENGTH: 69 | AGILITY: 97 | INTELLIGENCE: 157 | ENDURANCE: 98 | LUCK: 58]`
`[FREE STAT POINTS: 0]`
"You spent them," said Maeve, at some point that week.
"I spent them."
"In *September*."
"I’m aware of when it is."
---
At home, the notable thing was that nothing was notable.
Nyra had stopped being a concealment problem entirely somewhere in September and had immediately become a different problem, which was that she now wanted to go places. She had a list. She had an actual written list, in a notebook, with places on it and a column for whether James had said yes.
Alice had signed her name in the yes column beside two of them without asking anybody, which James discovered on a Sunday and elected not to fight.
His mother got a new job in October, three days a week in an office off Collins Avenue, and was extremely pleased about it and told everybody at length that it was not about the money.
Alice was in the house most nights and out of it most days. She had, by November, a bus card, an opinion about a television programme she claimed not to watch, and a standing arrangement with Ronan’s assessors whereby she came to the north hall on Wednesdays and told newly qualified Challengers what they were doing wrong, which made four of them cry in October and produced measurable improvement in all four by December.
Nobody in that house discussed the Tower at the table.
That had happened on its own and nobody had proposed it.
---
James looked at the international board on the Wednesday before Floor 35, on the operations level, with a coffee.
He had not looked at it since August.
`INTERNATIONAL FRONTIER — VERIFIED STANDINGS`
`SOUTH KOREA — FLOOR 35 CLEARED`
`IRELAND — FLOOR 34 CLEARED — TEAM ZERO`
`UNITED STATES — FLOOR 33 CLEARED`
`CHINA — FLOOR 31 CLEARED`
`ENGLAND — FLOOR 31 CLEARED`
`JAPAN — FLOOR 30 CLEARED`
He read the top two lines twice.
Second.
Not by much. One floor, and one floor was nothing, and the Koreans had cleared 35 nine days ago and had not posted a 36 yet.
It was still the first time in fourteen months that Ireland had not been on the top line.
Nobody had done anything wrong. That was the thing James kept arriving at. Korea had gone up six floors in three months because Korea had spent three months going up floors, and Team Zero had gone up two because Team Zero had spent three months building an organisation that could put ten other people into a tower.
Both of those had been decisions. Both of them had been the right one.
"Ah," said Finn, arriving at his shoulder. "You’ve seen."
"I’ve seen."
"It was Tuesday week. Maeve told me not to tell you until you looked, because she said you’d take it badly."
"I’m not taking it badly."
"You’re standing in a corridor drinking cold coffee at a screen."
"...It got cold while I was reading."
---
`[TEAM ZERO — PARTY CONFIRMED]`
`[JAMES GANNER — FINN HALE — MAEVE CALLAHAN — RONAN CLEARY — CILLIAN WARD]`
`[CHALLENGERS: 5 / 5]`
`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`
`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — NOT TRANSFERRING]`
They went in on the Friday at nine from the strategy room, which had become the thing they did.
Behind them, through the glass, the building was at full running speed. Both training halls occupied. The armoury issuing to Team Two for a Floor 10 expedition on Saturday. Somebody from operations going down the corridor with Team Zero’s equipment manifest on a tablet for James to thumb. A media coordinator on a phone. Ronan’s assessors in the small briefing room with the door shut and the whiteboard full.
`[LIVE BROADCAST ACTIVE — REGION: IRELAND]`
`[FLOOR 35 ENTRY CONFIRMED]`
---
They came out inside a mountain.
The first thing was the air. It was cold and completely still and it had been in there a long time — stale, mineral, with a thickness to it that got into the back of the throat on the first breath.
They were standing on a landing.
It was enormous. Twenty metres across and fifteen deep, floored in dressed stone flags worn smooth down the middle and rough at the edges, with a low balustrade along the left side that dropped away into dark.
Behind them, where the entrance had been, there was wall.
Ahead, a main corridor went into the mountain — six metres wide, arched, with a barrel vault overhead — and it was not a tunnel. It had been *built*. The vault was cut stone in courses. There were pillars down both sides at eight-metre intervals, enormous ones, each a good two metres through, going up into the dark of the roof.
Light came from somewhere above. Narrow shafts of it, cut through the rock at a steep angle, coming down in four pale columns along the length of the corridor with dust drifting in them.
Somewhere off to the right, deep in, water was dripping into water at a slow and completely regular rate.
And every sound any of them made went away down that corridor and came back about two seconds later.
"Right," said Cillian, very quietly. "I’m going to whisper for a bit."