The Infernal Nexus by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone [Stone, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Book, Prose, Novel
ISBN: 1903654165
Publisher: Big Finish
Published: 2001-07-16T16:04:32+00:00

* –Scram’ is (most likely) a Registered Trademark ® VermKnid Enterprises and is (not) used under licence. All rights reserved. And all that stuff.

…until at last she came to a sign that broke through by way of its restraint, like a moment of silence in the clashing discord of an avant garde fugue:

The tunnels had opened out into a cavern-chamber every bit as big as those of the Station itself – but in the same way one knew the tunnels to be tunnels, as opposed to merely passageways and conduits, the chamber spoke to parts of you hardly knew you had, and told them that wherever else you might be, in any other sense, in the most important sense you were deep, deep underground. You were buried alive.

One of the things that annoys the inhabitants of what are called the Infernal Regions is the assumption that their multiverse looks like a molten lava bed as drawn by Ernst.

The fact that their multiverse consists of bubbles in endless rock, they point out, misses the point. The point being the sheer size of said bubbles. The bubble-worlds themselves are quite big enough that the nature of them is no more evident than the planetary nature of a picture-book English landscape. The bubble-worlds had land and sky just like everyone else, produced any number of different terrains from jungle to desert to mountain ranges – and none of them, as such, looked like Hades after an extra delivery of charcoal.

This chamber in the Underland, however, looked just as people who had never actually been to the Infernal Regions assumed them to be. The sewer-gas flares that had thus far lit Mora’s way became roaring pressure vents, between which rose shanty-town dwellings built from garbage. At first sight it might have been reminiscent of the chaos of Station Control itself – but only at first sight. For all its seeming complexity, the Station and all its disparate components operated under a kind of underlying logic, a control that allowed it to function in the same way that a dance floor by and large does not descend into a riot. Here that was completely absent, as though the Underland were a kind of anti-Station and operating under the precise opposite of Control.

Rotting, unidentifiable matter hung from gibbets. Various items that were entirely too identifiable in the sewer-gas light were strung between the mounds. The crowd of malformed inhabitants moved about their silent business with a sense of animal purpose. There were a lot of them, and, rather than the aimless, skulking wanderings of the individuals Mora had encountered before, they moved like a pack – a single entity composed of a thousand mindless units. And as Mora stood there, every single one of them turned in her direction. The mess of them drifted towards her with the kind of slow deliberation common to scavengers. It would only be a matter of time before the group-dynamic mind fully realised that this potential prey was indeed alone

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