Stairs were cut into the wall of the Pit, a sharply descending spiral winding down into the darkness of a hole that vanished even to my greatly enhanced eyes and other senses, fading into obscurity after hundreds of feet of power resistant metal. What purpose the stairs might serve when the descent was far too long for normal people to traverse on foot we did not know, but we did not need to either. All three of us could fly, after all. Still, it would be the height of impropriety to simply barge in and might create some awkwardness if we didn't announce ourselves, so we tried the stairs at first. Besides, trying to sneak into the prison under cover of Anne's cube might not go over well.
The staircase only went down fifty feet before our descent was interrupted by wrist-thick bars forming a gigantic horizontal grate that spanned the whole width of the Pit. The grate itself had either been invisible or not existed at all until we set foot on that floor and I suspected that anyone that tried to fly or drop down the apparently empty hole from above would have been in for a very nasty surprise. Next to the staircase, at the same depth as the grate, lay a cavernous depression into the wall, leading to an obvious rest area after only a small tunnel. Seats of flexible metal fibers lined the walls as well as several gleaming silvery tables with odd linear script along their rim as well as smaller circles of more such symbols across their surface. It was the first bit of art we'd seen in the entire complex, though I suspected they were hardly art at all.
The room was illuminated by no apparent source, a constant low level of lighting being maintained in all of it at once. It made for an odd, slightly eerie atmosphere in that it did not allow the formation of shadows, any difference in illumination negated by what to my senses felt like a vibrating electromagnetic field occupying all empty spaces... except a fifteen-foot radius around Mandy where it fell into stand-by mode. Light coming from the rest of the room still mostly broke up shadows and maintained the mystique of the place, but like all good tricks it became less impressive now that I knew how it was done. It was only the truly great tricks that became more spectacular when they were revealed, mostly because they were no tricks at all.
"Mandy," I told the redhead in a whisper, "disable the cloaking."
"Why? Wouldn't it be funnier if we jumpscared Miss Warden in her own den?"
"And then we'd be politely asked to leave, by however many guardian golems she's managed to build since the Invasion." If anyone had told me even just a month earlier that I'd be advocating against messing with the girl that had helped backstab me and several others during the Invasion, I'd ask them if what they were smoking worked on supers and whether I could have some. Now... we had bigger problems to deal with and none of us were who we had been back then.
Jerry put one giant robotic arm on Mandy's shoulder in either admonishment or reassurance and with a sigh my best friend let go of the crystal cube that was also a sphere. It being my little sister's work it refused to do the predictable thing and drop to the ground. Instead it floated in mid-air, in the exact spot it had been left. The cloaking field did turn off though, and the illuminating enchantment started working in the volume it had previously been unable to detect existed. Whether the cube had an actual off switch or this was because the cloaking field's radius became zero with nobody touching it, I did not know. It wasn't the only change in the room though.
Molten metal appeared from thin air before us, seemingly oozing up through the metal-covered ground. My super-senses put the lie to that, little droplets of silvery liquid smaller than the eye could see clearly teleporting in or being conjured before melding into a greater mass. It looked like ferrofluid in a rapidly shifting magnetic field, except the magnetic field did not exist. The Warden did not need such intermediaries when she had direct control over metal. Silver, grey, black and a hundred other shades between them, the mixture flowed upright until it formed a six-foot-tall pillar then started flowing into a more complex shape.
First it formed a rough head, then split four featureless limbs from the main mass that was beginning to look like a torso. It soon was vaguely humanoid, gaining fingers, nose, ears, eyes and mouth, before it grew even more in detail. It first became a familiar girl then formed clothing of metal just as the skin gained almost human texture, forming not just large-scale features but also hair, skin pores, tiny little wrinkles and even fingerprints. Metal fluids of different hues shifted under that skin, forming veins and arteries of silver even as my senses revealed deeper shifts that created muscles and bones, organs and soft tissues, an entire human body sculptured out of various alloys down to the cellular level. I was pretty sure it lacked biochemistry entirely, but the materials it was made up seemed to be enchanted to mimic it. Its heart beat, sending a liquid metal mix coursing through thousands of miles of artificial blood vessels, muscles of tiny metal wires flexed as its chest expanded at its first breath, eyes of metallic glass opened up and took in the world for the first time. The entire process, the making of a hundred trillion metal replicas of human cells in an interconnected whole, took all of ten seconds, only seeming longer due to my dilated perception of time.
"Oh, it's you," the statue spoke with Liz's voice. "I shouldn't have made this place so obscure, no villains ever visit. Taking out some terrorist trash would have been nice, for a change."
"We could go a few rounds if you want," I offered. The last time Liz had tested her golems against me had been fun.
"Tempting, but no. The government still needs Oklahoma," she joked before her surprisingly expressive metal face retreated into the cold aloofness of the statue it really was. "Now spill, what's the situation? You wouldn't have come here if it weren't important." She glanced at Mandy and Jerry. "And it better be important if you saw fit to tell your friends about a secret government facility."
"We wish to talk to General Rinaker about a matter of foreign affairs," Mandy spoke while I was still thinking how to phrase our request. How does one even ask about organising what would basically be an invasion of another country, including the use of weapons of mass destruction? Knowing the government, there was probably a form for it. It was probably named something bland and alphanumerical and seriously misleading not due to strategic or public relations considerations but because that's how bureaucracies were.
"You want to talk now? After moving out of the country to avoid dealing with our organisation out of some misguided conscientious objection?" My best friend and the statue of an old enemy stood there glaring at each other for a good fifteen seconds without a word being exchanged. OK, so there was more to Mandy's hostility toward Liz than just ancient schoolyard arguments. On one hand, that meant two of the most powerful supers around weren't being immature idiots. On the other hand, that would have been a good thing to know before walking into what was probably the biggest and most important military installation in the country short of Cheyenne Mountain.
"Maybe the General should hear us out before the arguments start flying?" I said, breaking the standoff. How was it that I was the voice of reason here?
"Fine!" Liz's glare swept from me to Jerry in his battle-suit, to the inactive cube. "But do not use that... whatever it was that hid you, stay close and no funny business. This is a military installation, we can't have you breaching its security for unannounced visits," she told us. "Such acts are called incursions, you know."
Well... she was right on at least that much. Maybe we should have called ahead, but this place did not have communications with the outside world except through powers. It seemed not to have an electrical grid either... or water and sewage systems... or even ventilation. Everything was probably handled through powers, which made it dependant on Liz and gave it a single failure point. On the other hand, without conventional systems it was completely invulnerable to both conventional intrusion and the majority of attempts to compromise it, superpowered or otherwise.
Liz's construct led us not to the stairs but straight to the hole of the Pit, a levitating platform of metal forming beneath her feet the moment she walked out over empty air. We followed as instructed, the platform handling the weight of Jerry's armor without budging a hair out of position. Then the platform descended, dropping into the seemingly bottomless shaft like the world's scariest, least safe elevator. The people at OSHA would literally cry in horror if they ever saw - which was the secret main reason the facility was both an official secret and magically hidden.
The metal grate did not interrupt our descent. The platform passed through it as if it weren't there with us upon it, and I realized this was another security measure. To pass through the grate its enchantment had to detect us and grant us access. Had we been actual intruders using Anne's cloaking device to bypass security, the grid would have been an obstacle we'd need to blast our way through, immediately revealing ourselves. Even incorporeality of our own might not help due to its power-resistant properties, not unless we were intruders in... well... our actual weight class. At that point the US government would have far bigger concerns than who snuck into a prison.
After the grate there followed a hundred feet of empty shaft, its grey metal walls not smooth but carved in a scrollwork-like pattern. Physics ever so slightly shifted around each and every one of the literally millions of symbols in patterns that formed circles similar to the ones in the restroom's tables but much, much larger. If those circles back there had been for teleportation of food and drinks as I suspected, then the ones in the shaft were probably meant to bring defenders or further security measures. Considering the largest circles were fifteen feet across, any intruders would be swarmed in smaller versions of the metal golems Liz liked so much. Then, there were the spikes.
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Black iron protrusions extended out of the walls by at least a couple of feet, five of them spread out every fifth of the total length of this portion of the bore. They definitely looked like iron to my senses, pure and crude and roughly cast, but were as tough as the toughest mundane armor plating, their resilience exceeding their material properties in a very familiar way. Similarly familiar was the way currents of electrons moved within their mass, pressing towards each spike's sharp point and giving it a bright silvery shine that would have been visible even to normal humans.
"Why do you have Mavethan lightning spikes here?" I demanded sharply, pulling the whole platform to a dead stop with Proximakinesis, overwhelming its power resistance with brute force.
"Because they're cheap to mass-produce, quick to enchant, rugged, easy to repair, and an actually decent security system," Liz's statue answered with a hint of annoyance in her voice and an impatient tapping of her foot against the platform. "Now stop holding the elevator or I'll kick you off."
"Very well." I relaxed my hold and the platform continued its descent. "But if I hear anything about you or the government starting blood sacrifices it will be my turn to threaten you." And while this entire facility was built to be as anti-super as Liz and the General knew how to make it, it was not anti-asteroid.
We crossed a second grate, followed by another length of borehole full of lightning spikes and teleportation circles, then a third and a fourth. The air began first to whistle past then to press and roar with tornado-like force as we picked up more and more speed before hitting terminal velocity. By the tenth grate I was fairly sure there were small but important differences between each hundred-foot length of the tunnel. By the twentieth, I was certain. While they seemed identical, both the grates and the other defenses were enchanted differently even if the end result was the same. Intruders that managed to break through the first through anything other than overwhelming force would not have gained any advantages in overcoming the layers that followed and tricks developed by examining the first layer from the outside might not work on the deeper ones.
As we went deeper and deeper, another quality of the Pit's defenses became clear. Nowhere did we see any actual living creatures, either as guards or as support staff. Everything was done through enchantments and physical matter, both in the passive and active defenses and in the golems that would presumably be brought in to fight off intrusions. Any super that gained power through murder, violence, lifeforce-absorption, blood, fear, or similar methods would get nothing out of their long, long trek into the depths of the Earth. No, they would either be slowly worn down through attrition, or overwhelmed by large numbers of teleporting mindless constructs all the while fighting in a place where everything was power-resistant.
After a mile and a total of forty-two layers of defenses, we came before what looked like a massive vault door spanning the entire tunnel from wall to wall. It was the size of a five-story apartment building, every inch of its face carved with runes whose magical properties visibly distorted physics, and it was not a door at all. It was actually a wall, a solid block of power-resistant metal and an extension of the Pit's walls themselves. The entire metaphysical weight and power resistance of the massive facility coursed through it. Attempting to affect a portion of it with powers would be as difficult as affecting the facility in its entirety and from how my senses were stopped cold by it I would probably have to put so much effort to do so I'd be halfway to exhaustion.
Liz had no such issue. She had built the facility herself over the course of months, infusing the material with her power every time she added an expansion. The platform, the golem she was remotely piloting, and the rest of us accompanying her passed through the barrier as if it weren't there because Liz decided the facility would be momentarily permeable to us and so it was. After thirty feet of darkness we were through to the next portion of the Pit. Seeing it from within let me know the "door" had no means of being opened or bypassed built into it. The Warden had to actively allow people to pass and since it was a homogenous solid no amount of stealth or skill would help. Enough brute force would still work, but attackers would need nukes - plural - or equivalent.
The portion of the Pit behind those massive defenses was very different. It still had defensive runic enchantments and lightning spikes but most of the space in its walls was taken up by tunnel entrances. At first the tunnels were only ten feet tall and twelve wide, twenty such entrances for each "floor" of the facility we passed through. They were long though, long enough to disappear into the darkness. Their contents varied, from simple storage lockers and habitation spaces, to machine workshops, chemistry labs, greenhouses and supply depots of all kinds. Smaller tunnels branched out from them, places we got little more than a glimpse into as we flew by.
The enchantments here were more about regulating temperature and atmospheric pressure, both of which had become quite oppressive more than a mile under the surface. Normal people already wouldn't be able to live here without them, or some other means of protecting themselves, which made the thousands of people we saw, both soldiers and civilian experts, something of a surprise. There were three hundred floors of such facilities with a total of six thousand primary tunnels, any one of which could have comfortably fit every inhabitant of the small town on the surface. This part of the facility was a city - a large one. And it was only the second part we were seeing.
Another giant wall pretending to be a vault door followed. It was physically identical to the one before but its enchantments were different. They served the same purpose of defense and separation though, so they weren't terribly important in the grand scheme of things. We passed through it and that was that.
"How long did this place take to build?" Jerry's... slightly awed voice came from his suit's external speakers.
"You're assuming it is finished," Liz's golem replied as we sped through the next section. "It is not; I am always building, even as I escort a trio of international-sized problems to those that can take them off my hands."
None of us had anything to say to that, so we watched more tunnels speed by. These ones were nearly twice the size of those in the previous section, a good fifteen feet high and wide. They all had actual vault doors protecting them, slabs of six feet thick metallic glass. They were also mostly transparent, so we could see what was behind them with only slight visual distortion. The tunnels here did not have people, or living and employment arrangements meant for them. They were strictly storage places, warehouses for things that were either dangerous or restricted. Many of them were still empty or even lacking their vault doors, evidence of the facility's still unfinished nature. Some of them were not.
Several entire floors contained what were clearly tanks, of a make none of us had seen before. They were significantly larger than the old M1 Abrams, taking nearly the entire fifteen-foot width of their tunnels, with a thicker chassis and a hundred and a five-point-one-inch main turret large enough and with enough barrel length to have a place on a naval warship. Far more concerning was what my senses could tell me of the tanks' internals. Electrical motors of mundane design took surprisingly little space in their frame, obviously enhanced beyond what physics could account for. Those weren't the concerning bits. What would provide the electricity for them was; a five-ton slab of layered thermoelectric cells, mirror-like aluminum-tungsten plating and thicker, duller sheets of lead-tungsten surrounding a narrow empty space at the center. There was only one purpose for such a component.
"Those tanks are all nuclear-powered," I accused with a scowl.
"When you can conjure any metal resource and give it whatever shape you need, many technologies that previously were prohibitively expensive become viable," Liz easily said. "Besides, don't pretend that a few thousand paltry radiothermal generators hold a candle to what any of you three can do. After the last kaiju battle where you blew up an entire island, the politicians were grasping at everything that would make them feel even a little in control of the situation. Volunteering some big guns worked... for the time being. Do not do anything too crazy to further destabilise the government through your mere existence, OK?"
We passed more tunnels, some with more vehicles of various types, others with planes, more still with missiles or even satellites. Others held raw materials instead; steels of various types, enhanced armor plating, silver with enhanced conductivity, semi-conductive crystal wafers perfect for industrial electronics production, metallic glasses, rare earths in enough quantities to crash their global markets, and of course fissile materials along with enhanced radiation shielding. Four thousand tunnels along another mile of borehole which would hold tens of millions of tons of what was essential resources for slightly enhanced mundane war. Their presence also explained the US Army's ability to build and arm the Miami wall in months without crippling an already damaged economy.
Yet another massive barrier followed. We passed it in silence as well.
The section of the facility that followed had even larger tunnels, a mere seven per floor. They were thirty feet wide and a little higher than they were wide but just as long and branching as the others before them. Only a hundred floors this time, for a total of seven hundred tunnels, the majority of them still empty. Those that were full however, contained only giant statues of metal. Some were only ten feet tall and a simple metallic grey, with four layers of them stacked on each other's shoulders. Some were twenty feet tall and bluish black, double-stacked. The largest were a towering thirty-five feet of green-black alloy like the guardians at the top of the facility, built thickly enough to take the whole width of their storage tunnels. With each tunnel disappearing in the darkness we couldn't tell how many of the golems there were, but even with less than ten percent of the tunnels occupied the total had to be over fifty thousand.
It was an absolutely massive, enormous army by any measuring, utterly dwarfing the attempted creation of tank-equivalent soldiers in the Miami wall if not in numbers then at least in capabilities. I knew that the golems could fly fast enough to keep up with subsonic aircraft and had long-range attacks that could kill weaker supers in only a handful of shots. Those had been smaller, older golems with the grey and blue tinted skin; I'd never fought or seen the green ones before. With the teleportation circles built into the facility having an undetermined range but capable of at least deploying them outside where they could proceed to fly to their destination, they were a literal ace in the hole on the side of General Rinaker, Liz, and the part of the US government they represented.
Their presence here also altered the situation we'd come to talk to the General about considerably, at least as far as the immediate threat was concerned.
"Welcome, guests, to Sheol," Liz's metal body-double announced formally as we got to yet another massive wall, presumably the final one. "The first and only prison for superpowered criminals, foreign or domestic." Instead of escorting us through, she shaped the metal to form a corridor just wide enough for Jerry to walk through in his armor if he crouched. "The General and I are expecting you in the first conference room to the right. Do try not to overstay your welcome." And with that not so subtle warning, the Liz-shaped golem vanished. One moment it was there, the next it was gone, leaving only vacuum for the rushing air to fill.
Well... at least it hadn't been boring so far.