Tunnels 01, Tunnels

his heels so much that he was barely moving at all when the Second Officer gave him such a hefty shove that he was knocked clean off his feet and sent flying through the doorway into the light. Skidding over the stone floor on his front, he came to a rest and lay there, a little stunned.
    The light was all around him, and he was blinking rapidly in its harsh glare. He heard the door slam and, from a rustle of papers, he knew at once there was someone else in the room. He immediately imagined who it -- or they -- would be: two tall Styx, most likely looming behind a table, just as there'd been during the Dark Light sessions.
    "Stand up," ordered a reedy, nasal voice.
    Chester did so, and slowly raised his eyes to the source. He couldn't have been more astonished by the sight that greeted him.
    It was a single Styx, and he was wizened and small, his thinning gray hair pulled back at the temples and his face crisscrossed with so many lines and wrinkles that he looked like a bleached raisin. Hunched sharply over a tall desk with a slanted top, he resembled an ancient schoolmaster.
    Chester was completely disarmed by this apparition with the sheer light all around it. This was not what he'd been expecting at all. He was beginning to feel relieved, telling himself that perhaps things were going to turn out better than he'd thought after all, when his eyes met those of the old Styx.
    They were the coldest, darkest eyes Chester had ever seen. They were like two bottomless wells that drew him toward them and by some unnatural and unwholesome power pulled him down into their voids. Chester felt a chill descend over him as if the temperature had plummeted in the room, and he shivered violently.
    The old Styx dropped his eyes to the desk, and Chester swayed unsteadily on his feet, as if he'd been abruptly released from something that had had him in its relentless grip. He let out his breath in a rush, unconscious until now that he'd been holding it in. Then the Styx began to read in a measured tone.
    "You have been found guilty," he said, "under Order Forty-two, Edicts Eighteen, Twenty-four, Forty-two..."
    The numbers went on, but it meant nothing to Chester until the Styx paused and, very matter-of-factly, said the word sentence . Chester really began to listen at this point.
    "The prisoner will be taken from this place and conveyed by train to the Interior, and there be Banished, relinquished to the forces of nature.. So be it," the old Styx finished, clapping his hands and holding them pressed hard together, as if he were wringing something out. Then he slowly raised his head from his papers and said, "May the Lord have mercy on your soul."
    "What... what do you mean?" Chester asked, reeling under the Styx's icy gaze and the implications of what he'd just heard.
    Without needing to consult the papers before him, the Styx simply reiterated the punishment and then fell silent again. Chester grappled with the questions that were racing through his head, moving his lips but emitting no sound at all.
    "Yes?" the old Styx asked, in such a way that suggested he'd been in this situation many times before and found it thoroughly tiresome to have to converse with the lowly prisoner before him.
    "What... what does that mean?" Chester eventually got out.
    The Styx stared at Chester for several seconds and, with total impassivity, said, "Banished. You will be escorted as far as the Miners' Station, many fathoms down, and then left to do as you will."
    "Taken deeper into the earth?"
    The Styx nodded. "We have no need for your kind in the Colony. You attempted to escape, and the Panoply takes a dim view of that. You are not worthy of service here." He clapped his hands together again. "Banished."
    Chester suddenly felt the immense weight of all the millions of tons of dirt and rock above, as if they were pressing directly down on him, squeezing out his lifeblood. He staggered backward.
    "But I've done nothing . I'm not guilty of anything," he cried., holding out his hands and pleading with the emotionless little man. He felt as if he were being buried alive and that he would never again see home, or the blue sky, or his family... everything he loved and yearned for. The hope he had clung to ever since he'd been captured and locked up in that dark room gushed out of him like air from a burst balloon.
    He was doomed.
    This hateful little man didn't give a hoot about him... Chester saw that in the Styx's impassive face and in his frightful