NationStates Jolt Archive

“Nervous boy?” Jordan almost shook out of his seat, startled as the gruff voice grating his ears like nails scraping against glass. “Hey, boy. I asked you a question.” The voice repeated in an authoritative and indignant tone. Jordan looked up towards the epicenter of his disturbance, pushing back the jet-black helmet that had obscured his vision. The strap tightened around his neck.

“Well boy?!” the voice continued to clamor, “Huh?” He hadn’t the time to react. Jordan found his head slammed hard against the cold, metal walls of the armoured transport. He tried to perceive the hulking giant above him through the flurry of stars that were aggrading every corner of his eyes. The fuzzy picture became clearer as the seconds passed. He could now behold the general shape of the being above him, a hulking being clad in thick black Armour, arms and legs thick as tree trunks. “Last time I’m going to ask you, boy!”

Jordan broke free of the iron grip that had pinned him against the wall, struggling to stand as his wits returned to him. The picture was much clearer now. The man was much larger than Jordan was, a grotesque agglomeration of armor and muscle. His dissimilar eyes were transfixed upon him. One a sickly blue, the other a listless silver almost totally obscured by the milky film that had coalesced over those once pearly spheres.

The man’s face was a disgusting contortion of jagged bone and his pale flesh skin. The right side of his face rose high above the other. Drool slowly trickled down from his parched lips on the other side, which also appeared to be nigh paralyzed. His hair was ragged as that of a wild animal, and so oiled from lack of hygiene it shone brilliantly in the azure lighting of the Cage.

“What is your problem?” Jordan asked with the fires of anger heavy in his tones. He rubbed the back of his now numb skull, under the loose helmet.. Pulling his hand in front of his dazed eyes he noted the thick, red oil that now slicked the hard leather of his combat gloves. “Boy, I’ll finish what I started if you talk to me like that again!”

To his horror, the ghastly figure was none other than Captain Grubo, head of corporate security for Rock C391. Jordan had not realized he’d arrived already; he slept and daydreamed during the whole trip. “Sir, I’m so so-…” Jordan’s words were torn asunder by the bellows of his angry Captain, “Just answer my damn question boy! Are you nervous?” Jordan was quick to reply, “Not really sir, just tired is all.” Again his head contacted with a hard surface, this time the Cages titanium grating.

Grubo towered over him, his fists clinched into tight balls of sweaty leather gloves. “That aint no excuse boy; you were supposed to be in assignment room fifteen minutes ago you stupid bastard!” Jordan now knew the full scope of his transgressions.

Jordan Eder had just graduated from Hammer Security Corporation. He wasn’t the top of his class; he had no honors, just an average corporate soldier. He had been assigned to help augment the lousy security for Rock C391, one of the many master control centers for the incredible masses of asteroids various corporations mined for their valuable ores and minerals throughout the galaxy. For some inexplicable reason, security personnel had been disappearing from the facility periodically. The military came and left without so much as a word, giving no explanation as to how or where the men disappeared. The corporate supervisors were dumbfounded, but decided it best to assume the problem had been taken care of, and pursue a contract with a new corporation to supplement their weakened security detail.

Jordan was one of the three hundred sent. The command console in the briefing room revealed an elliptical rock that seemed to curl around the silver facility, which gleamed from the light of the nearby white star. Darkness found a home in the deep chasms that trailed about the rock’s gray skin. Impact craters of various sizes pocked the barren surface, while jagged peaks clawed up into the void towards the stars. He groaned at the thought of having to work in such a dreadful place.

In truth, he was nervous. He heard many stories about the disappearances, horrible stories. So he slept most of the two-day journey to the system, rest kept his mind at ease. Unfortunately, as the anger of Grubo has shown him, he had rested far too long.

Grubo dragged him from the ground and about threw him at the door, avoiding another nasty fall by catching himself on the lever that opened the door. “Get yer ass out of here or I’ll cut it off boy!” The ugly man scowled as Jordan ran towards the assignment office, blood still dripping down his armor from the back of his skull.

Without shade, the sharp light speed lances of solar radiation would quickly boil your blood and bleach your bones dry, and in the shade, without the luxury of any appreciable atmosphere, blood would freeze, water would turn to ice and mince each and every cell within your body. It made the lack of comfort inherent to Corp level PA much less of a grievance.

Jordan was out in the midday sun, walking through a valley of jagged hills born of multiple and violent impacts from meteorites that met no atmospheric resistance. Throwing up clouds of rock and silt, vaporizing and crystallizing the ground into ornate designs that defied every principle of geometry known in the universe. Beautiful as it was dangerous. Each step was a trial in its own right; the ground was covered in a very fine and very lite layer of dust that clung together through some sort of complex static forces, hiding small cracks and wide crevasse alike. Only the seismic scanners embedded in Jordan's goggles kept the next step from being his last, though that didn't make the ground any less hazardous; it was still full of holes, loose, and the maze of fissures didn't make navigation very easy in any case.

He was out here on patrol, though what he was looking for and what exactly he was protecting with his presence was anyone's guess. The only structure within three miles was an underground guard shack that had seen better days, days which none were old enough to remember. The walls crumbling from decay in some places, cracked by the pressure of the ground slowly shifting in various directions others, and in still other placed, gored by knives of stone too massive to be stopped by walls of simple steel. The wiring barely carried a current, meaning that only a fraction of the systems required to call it a guard anything were operational. The pipes leaked water, which further ruined the walls and floor with rust, and in some cases shorted out more sensitive electronics. It was a dive. The kind not worth attacking, or defending from attack more importantly. But it was a welcome dive in contrast to the state of the world outside.

On top of abhorrent weather and geographical conditions, the patrol was excruciatingly boring as well as eerie. There was no one around, the radio was always silent, and the E-train lines had long ago fallen into disuse; thick tracks of ashen metal humming a soft monotone song in the EM spectrum that spread across the barren landscape in precise patterns designed for near anal efficiency. They made the area feel even more like death, as if some minion of that totally unknown force had swooped down from the heavens and cleaved away all life. Even with the silent song they sang in the EM band didn't help; it just seemed like a calm and constant breeze over a forlorn graveyard. A graveyard with an undertaker skulking around like a mischievous specter.

Even though all available telemetry, IR, UV, X-ray, and MPF data revealed no other life form other than himself, Jordan still felt as if something with eyes, cruel eyes full of malice and malignance, was watching him from some hidden shadow. Each patrol these eyes felt as if they were closing in, getting steadily closer. And each his subconscious became perturbed by the emergence of this ghastly force, animal instinct caused him to turn sharply and level his ready auto-rifle against whatever malevolent force found itself in those digital sights. Yet, each time there was only empty space.

"Come in JE 559, come in JE 559; what is your status, over?" A voice crackled through the comm system in Jordan's helmet, right on time.

"Same as it always is command; bored and lonely. There's nothing here now, there wasn't anything here last time you checked in, and there won't be next time you call me up, over." He replied with a tinge of distaste; status reports just underscored how worthless and unpleasant his assignment was.

"Be that as it may, you have a job to do out there JE 559, and as simple as it is we here expect you not to fuck up. Just because your not proper military doesn't mean you're a worthless civi toting around a shiny gun, over."

Jordan looked around again through the cobalt blue lenses of his PA optics, a thick menagerie of electronics shaped into a goggle over each enhanced eye, encompassing less of the world than a straight up visor but offering more detailed information for what was perceived through them. There was nothing, though he knew he could feel something staring into the very depths of his soul, past black powered-armor plating and spectra webbing with the burning lances of its demonic eyes.

"Yeah, I know." He finally replied with a voice partially muffled by the influx of oxygen and other gases necessary for breathing, that were fed through an armored tube connected to the armored gas-mask that covered the majority of his face, save everything above about the midpoint of his nose, and not quite reaching his ears.

Whatever it was, he could only guess; either some random firing of neurons or an imbalance in his head that caused needless anxiety. Or some physical force that transcends the very meaning of the word evil. Either way it remained elusive, beyond sight and sound. Jordan began to wonder if that shiny gun would just slow him down needlessly if it was the later thing disturbing him. Best not to dwell on it, best to just move on.

He threw his weapon up against his shoulder, and made for the single-car E-train that bore towards a station almost dipping over the edge of the horizon. That train came every day at the same time, and would only wait for about 45 minutes before again departing; Jordan had to move if he wanted to leave that infernal region of metaphysical misery. "Coming back home Command, JE 559, out." He ran as quick as was possible without loosing his footing and breaking leg, which wasn't very fast at all, adding to his dismay; if he had to run from whatever phantom that stalked him, he wouldn't be moving very fast.

"Acknowledged JE 559, Command out." Then there was only silence to escort him towards the only thing within a hundred miles capable of taking him home. That blasted, unending silence.

The ride was long and lonely. With only the thrum of the lines powering the train forward, and the clattering of metal as the train tittered gently and slightly from side to side to keep you company. In the heavens above, through the reinforced Plexiglas and transparent forcefield that comprised almost the entire ceiling of the wire-frame vehicle, storms of light morphed from contrails to misty clouds before vanishing from existence. Star spirits every chroma of blue, violet, green, and red snaking through a sea of star-stained blackness, chasing after the D-Pistons that had created them.

They were the natural side affect of relativity being shattered utterly into nothing by the pounding of a giant piston that warped the metaphysical into manifestation. Space was destroyed, in effect. The bewitching light was particles: basic, exotic; some with principles that left them impossible to classify; leaking through the fissure the D-pistons left behind. The holes in space eventually repaired themselves after a few meaningless picoseconds, but enough energy is released from the cataclysmic process to light up the sky for hundreds of millions of kilometers. They weren't fuel efficient, they weren't very safe, but they got the Leviathan class freighters through the universe at frightening speed. But those ships were always invisible, guarding angels that were too far away to give a damn.

Sometimes Jordan would wish he was aboard one of those ships; a wish that was became more prominent as time went on. Away from the tedium, the anxiety, all the needless bullshit. In an hour he'd be back at the Maginot security fortress, with Grubo and all his glorious friends to deal with during the daily debriefing. Those were always hell.

When Grubo wasn't festering with the kind of anger to bring titans to their knees in fear, he was being an abusive bastard. Why does the timeclock say you came back three-seconds early you dumb bastard? A stupid question. No rational person could be that agitated over a soldier's minor misinterpretation of time. Grubo just needed an excuse to belittle and berate someone.

His friends were even worse, a fact that seemed to defy every law of probability one could find in any math tome. Houken was an old captain from an entirely different unit, and one of Grubo's closest 'friends', if such a man could really make friends. He looked friendly enough; wide eyes and a big smile besieged by a well-trimmed show-white beard. His voice was a strong as his body despite its age, and he always had a relaxed disposition. Deception, all of it.

This amiable countenance hid a man just as intolerable and cruel as Grubo himself. And it was because of their similar natures that they had become friends, and also why Jordan’s abominable Captain gave him joint command of his unit, much to everyone’s chagrin. Houken's unit had to patrol a relatively large chunk of C391's administrative area, a region about the same size that Grubo's own unit had to secure, the only issue though, was that Houken didn't have enough men, a problem ever unit commander shared. Something that was almost entirely the fault of the man masked by a friendly façade. A fact that Houken never kept in mind when he demanded Jordan's unit pick up the slack for him, and a fact Jordan and his comrades soon learned.
Even when supplementing Houken’s paltry unit was impossible; he still made them pay with their psychological and physical health each time he found lacking in its new and highly inappropriate augmentary role.

Consecutive late night patrols, seven-hour exercises the next morning; food rationing drills, and forced conscription into radical new experiments upon implants and a soldiers psychological state; things that proper military personnel could scarcely survive through. So it came to no surprise when steadily, men were being discharged for medical reasons: extreme exhaustion, depression, the beginnings of altered personality disorder and other conditions following the degeneration of a person’s mental condition, and wounds that always appeared suspiciously self-inflicted. The loss of more men just pissed him off more, though it was obvious where the blame lie.

He had once raised his voice into a hoarse tone so foul the ears screamed in unremitting agony. Angry about the latest patrol reports, which showed the ROI to be up nearly ten-percent due to lax security detail in the area. There was no food for the next three days, only misery as Jordan’s body screamed out in terrible pain, with an overcharged metabolism trying to support a body enhanced by gene therapy and cybernetic augmentations. Hallucinations quickly became commonplace out in the field. Specters of loathing and unknown cruelty danced throughout Jordan’s field of vision, speaking in a language incomprehensible though the conveyed message was still somehow clear. Unspeakable things would befall Jordan soon, and his comrades as well if they didn’t eat; the residents of hell would manifest into physical being if the body didn’t consume itself first. But that was just for Jordan, for others the situation was far worse, to the point that two men never returned from their posts. Houken apologized for the ‘unforeseen’ consequences to the heads at the Security Directorate, and got off with only a slap on the wrist for the loss of men covered by insurance. Though his anger remained insatiable and Jordan found himself pulling triple shifts; first without food and now without sleep, death would be less painful he found himself thinking when the situation became this dire.

Jordan found himself distracted by a dark horizon shattered by a graveyard of giants, reduced to only their skeletons after eons of solar radiation decayed their flesh. Gornaum’s Lament after the last of he great giant kings from lore. It was a small cluster of momentous mountains that caught the sky in gnarled hands, and cast a shadow onwards over the opposite skyline, constantly morphing as the sun moved about the sky like a shimmering cloud, always appearing as something more terrible and evil with each movement by that white-hot stellar body. Jordan passed through it, and was chilled to the bone at the sight of those sharp mountain peaks, Sharp as the eyes of someone I wish I didn’t know… he thought quietly as the train slid along a winding trail of silently singing metal.

It was Testudo and his ghastly eyes that came to Jordan’s eye when he saw those sword-like mountaintops. He was the general surgeon of Jordan's medical unit. He wasn't loud, or prone to fits of rage like Grubo, or a slave driver like Houken, just quiet. Far too quiet. His eyes were cold as the deepest depths of space untouched by the piercing sunlight or wave of stellar heat for eons, a perfect pair of frigid blue spheres bisected by implants that coalesced into precise forms of daggers and spearheads. All that was required to render one helpless and empty, was one of Testudo’s hard stares, when those seawater eyes penetrated your very essence and impaled your soul. He was a cold man, and a quite man, or perhaps monster is a more apt moniker.

That was the only way to explain how he, and the ever bellowing, ever angry Grubo came to be comrades despite entirely different outward tendencies: they both were made of the same twisted and bestial materials on the inside. Good friends they were, and as such Testudo had more than a little leeway in how far he could go in treating the unsuspecting men of Jordan's unit, if you could call subtle torture of the mind and body, and more than questionable experiments being performed without a patients consent, medical treatment.

Loromir had been one such man to undergo the surgeon’s questionable practices. He went in for a routine examination, complaining of headaches that were likely the result of implants that needed their systems to be realigned with Loromir’s nervous system. He came back to the barracks two days later from what Testudo called ‘extensive surgery.’ He could barely walk; barely see, barely able to do anything without someone’s aid. His condition became all the more ill as time wore on. His skin grew paled, and his body thinner. His eyes slowly sunk deep into his skull like a galleon after having been molested by cannon shot. Not a week went by before Loromir was gone from his bed. They said he had to be moved to better facilities than what we could provide. But they never told us where. Jordan thought as his train slipped into the silver concrete maw of a tunnel built into a Cliffside.

Ten more minutes and he’d be closer to what he was forced to call home, a word he never knew he could hate with such ardent ferocity till he arrived on this rock of unnamable horrors. He leaned his head back, and tried to think of happy times in happier places. But his thoughts were anchored to C391, and everyone who ran it.

Soon his thoughts found the image of Lou’ran’t T'stil, the SouthRock regional commander. With cool blue eyes, a plain round face, and lean of body, he was a very hard man to read on the surface. Not only did he hardly speak, but what he managed to say was always cryptic and ambiguous in some way. "Patrol EK-191 with impunity. But only send half your unit." He said once to Grubo, who responded with a sort of knowing smirk that warped his already grotesque face into something more malignant, though Jordan never thought it possible. It was such an odd thing to say: to patrol a region double the norm with half the number. And do so with more determination than was required. It made no sense at face value.

But then again, one didn't need a degree in psychology to know that T'stil meant something more than what he said, even if you could never really tell what that hidden meaning was trying to convey. Even Grubo looked perplexed at times. Though that was just a nuance of communication, one Jordan could easily live with; no matter what was meant behind each of T’stil’s words, they hadn’t managed to affect him yet. The actual problem was that the terrible captain had T'stil's cyberenhanced ears.

For whatever inexplicable reason, T'stil tolerated Grubo's abuse despite the damage it caused the unit, and that caused to the integrity of the base's security as a whole. Not that either of them seemed to care very much; it was rumored they both spent more time in their respective offices 'studying security reports and analyzing detail statistics' than could be totaled with their time at HQ. Though theses were just rumors some said, forgetting that there is usually some validity at the base of such accusations. Either way, Jordan was not looking forward to what he was forced to call home right now.

Not five minutes later he arrived at the primary SouthRock E-train station. Soldiers and civilians milled about the utilitarian designed building with subtle hints of Baroque inspired architecture of modest size. Many rows of silver pillars held up the slab of metal that was so lovingly called a roof, leading up to the main office and lobby area where soldiers and miners alike waited for the E-train to take them to wherever they had been so unhappily assigned.

Some were departing for what areas of SouthRock were still generating some ore return, whereas others were returning from those areas tired and aching. The later were always covered in dirt and dust, no matter how powerful their static-repellors were, they always came home looking like worn and armored soldiers from a world of ochremen. Though everyone on the platform had one trait in they all shared: they were all miserable.

The pay was good, the benefits were excellent, and the hours were short. Yet, for all this, the nature of the work these men and women did was still tedious and agonizing. Depression and Mine Madness were the leading causes of 'dismissal' in the mines, ahead of machine malfunctions and E-feed psychosis. Jordan could just look at the expression burned across their faces: a despondent countenance of bitterness that was barely organic anymore, so infused with an amalgam of twisted machinery that they looked more like aberrant robots than men when dirt and soot didn't nearly obscure them completely.

They weren't sad, really, just self-aware. This was all they really had, working in dark mines for months at a time, it was all many could ever have unless they went into security or the military, and most couldn't meet the physical requirements to enter into either. That is unless they acquired enough in the way of money to have the necessary operations and gene-enhancements done, but that required a level of insurance coverage that wasn't available to your average miner, that is, unless he or she didn't mind going hungry for a few months. Other fields required education; the likes of which that could not be simply downloaded into ones own brain. One needed to be enrolled into a university, and many had neither the time nor the finances for such. They were locked in their current state for all practical purposes, and they knew it.

Jordan could feel sympathy but only so much: some one had to do the work even if it wasn't quite fair that movement up the economic and social ladder wasn't always easy. And as long as it wasn't him manually searching for new veins of ore in an environment so laden with EM background noise that no scanner could work with any degree of accuracy, and as long as it wasn't him repairing the E-lines as they broke down in spaces barely big enough to fit a crouching man, he just couldn't bring himself to care all that much. He hasn't heartless, just practical: there was nothing he could do about the social hierarchy if he tried. Besides, he was in the same boat: it was either move up the corporate security scale, or be forever locked patrolling places like C391. Life wasn’t easy on anyone.

So he walked through a gateway forged by doors sliding over a frictionless surface, and onto the station platform were all those depressed individuals remained almost oblivious to his presence, save for a glance that only conveyed that yes, the person behind those eyes still lived, for now. Otherwise he proceeded to the check-in office, and skipped the modest line with his security clearance. Though the procession of depressed shells of men moved swiftly enough that forming a line was really unnecessary, Jordan could still feel the resentment in their stares as he walked past them all, ten seconds closer to home than the guy at lines end; if only he were that guy.

He arrived at the entrance of SouthRock's main security fortress about an hour later. Nested between two immense mountains, and incised into the ground, it was a super-armored Versailles-like structure without the grandiose design. It was several stories high, and near featureless save for the rows and rows of auto-cannon turrets, laser lenses, and scores of other dangerous weapons that hid behind armor panels; the only evidence of their existence being those square puzzle pieces that had been incised into the buildings thick metal skin.

To the left and right of the massive door, lie heavy spheroid bunkers. Both were completely unmanned, operated by the SouthRock SI systems. Inside each was a menagerie of weapons and small cameras that swept over the entire area, waiting for whatever trouble that could be out there to enter their field of vision and face certain obliteration.

Overhead dim spotlights covered the area in a pale blue light barely sufficient to fight back the assaulting darkness when the sun fell over the horizon. It was a fortress in every meaning of the word, protecting all inside from things without, but never from threats within, the things Jordan worried about.

Though he could have taken a car or hopped aboard one of the buses of the facilities in-system transportation service, he opted to walk instead. He needed some time to think, or so he told himself: he really just wanted to delay the inevitable hell that was the daily debriefing. Houken would no doubt be perturbed about the Unit’s poor performance at a job it wasn’t meant to do, T’stil would be tolerating all the abuse, and Testudo would be imagining new ways in which to torture us as physicals drew near. There was nothing pleasant about these meetings.

So he took each slow thoughtless step over a landscape of thick concrete and steel, humming softly with electronic voices running power to the blinking guide lights that guarded the walkway's perimeter, like fat sentries glowing with cobalt armor, never moving even an inch from their assigned post.

Jordan was alone on his march towards Ter Zor, he hoped as much anyway. Out in the deadzone between civilizations, with only those miasmal vipers and contrails of colors escorting rays of starlight onto that zone's dark ashen surface, there was only company in flashing guide-lights and the shadows of rocky outcroppings made all the more menacing by the guide lights overhead. The later of which Jordan loathed and despised with an infinite Malvolian passion. Anything could be lurking in those dark depths of cosmological vastness. Be it a monster of abhorrent proportions, with gnarled claws meant to rend through bone, and sharp fangs meant to tear into flesh; or perhaps some incorporeal beast meant to devour Jordan's soul after a violent separation from his physical body, he helpless against such lurking terrors.

His combat optics, working in conjunction with eyes enhanced beyond reason, scanned each of these areas with Narcissus like impunity. Heat, UV, X-ray; the scans ran the gamut of the entire EM spectrum. Gravitic and Aeuonic echoes also added to the discerning chorus that shouted into every shadow regardless of its stature. Nothing. Always nothing.

For all the power and time wasted in search of phantoms… no, phantoms have some sort of tangibility: strange sounds, sometimes out of earshot; blurs in the corner of the eye, or in the center of one unfocused. Yet, these phantoms made no noise, and were never seen: they were the phantoms of phantoms, and Jordan didn't know if that made them harmless, or more dangerous.

He was about at the door, a hefty slab of reinforced alloys with names too complicated to pronounce without the aid of a dictionary. All that mattered was that they were heavy, they were thick, and anything behind them was safe from whatever could be hiding out here. Jordan had to get behind those doors. Then something caught his straining eyes.

It wasn't a blur really; it was not that distinct. It was awareness, the knowing that something was there even if you didn't remember seeing it. Jordan turned and took in a deep breath, walking slowly off the platform in a thud if emptiness could carry sound. Dust kicked up in miniature ashen cyclones with each heavy step. His trigger finger ready under thick combat fibers; his HammerTech auto-rifle with grenade attachment at full power; eyes as bright as a pair of verdant suns; if there was something here, he was ready to blow it back to whatever hell had spawned it.

Yet it was nothing; just a long gash running along the wall not fifty meters from the facilities entrance, almost invisible to all but the naked eye. It was clean, uniform, and not very deep; perhaps and accident with a magnetic torch or some other fuckup no engineer would fess up to. It didn't matter; Jordan could go home now. Then he felt something fall upon his shoulder through the armor’s touch sensors.

He reeled back and almost lost his balance in an environment that lacked standard gravity. He came close to letting off a few shots, but reason stopped him, something he was less than grateful for under the circumstances; had the thread been real he might now be dead. However, it was a glove, hard as rock and heavy too given the rate at which it descended from the sky, something he determined as he saw it land hard into the dusty ground.

Relief washed over him like the waters of a Biblical flood. Neuron’s stopped firing off a sense of unfathomable anxiety, synapses no longer conveyed messages of fear; joints and muscles relaxed and adrenaline stopped flowing like an endless river current. The phantoms vanished, and normalcy returned to Jordan’s body and soul.

Jordan took many deep breaths before his feet became steady again. He was ashamed inside, to be so ready to annihilate a simple glove that a tech had probably left on the roof, and had fallen for some simple but inexplicable reason. He went to go pick it up, but then a rather unpleasant voice boomed into abnormally sensitive ears as he neared it, reminding him of the trials he was soon to face.

"Boy, where the fuck are you?" Grubo screamed with unknowable anger.

"Coming sir, thought I saw some-..." he tried to reply, but was cut off by his Captain's cruel tone.

"I don't give a shit. Get in here now. We have an important meeting we need to be getting through but your lazy ass is holding us up." The voice quit after that, not a good sign; Grubo was so angry he was at a loss for words.

Jordan just walked away, forgetting about the glove as he contemplated the punishment T'stil would okay for making everyone stay longer than the wanted to for a meeting that probably meant nothing, but was held for appearance’s sake. So he walked through those heavy doors, and let them seal behind as he made a straight line for the conference room, forgetting all about a glove that was too heavy to be empty.