Chapter 171: The Ice Box

<Well that is quite pleasant,> BB said, sounding a lot more like his old self as the cool air washed over my body, <You probably don't realise it all the time, but I take quite a lot of the brunt of sensory input from your body these days. The heat and the alcohol from earlier was all too much, but this I could get used to.>

I couldn't disagree with him there. 

The blast of cool air had been a bit of a shock to the system, but it had been refreshing as hell. I couldn't help but let a little contented sigh out as I stepped into the club. 

If I hadn't seen the queue outside, I would have been seriously surprised by how busy the inside of the club was. 

The entire room was lit with a cool blue lighting scheme, with more blue lasers zipping back and forth across the ice box's premises. 

People were dancing all throughout the room, leaving almost no room for the woman and I to make our way through the people. That didn't seem to be much of a problem for her, though. 

The woman placed the palm of her hand on the wall as we walked into the entryway, which revealed a keypad. 

"Hey, step in a bit closer to me," She said before punching in any numbers. 

I did as she asked and sidled up next to her. With the two of us standing in what was basically just a doorway it was a pretty tight fit, my bare chest was pushed up against her warm back. 

It felt… nice

<Lord, I thought we got rid of your hormones after you found out that Lara was evil,> BB sighed, there was that mental eye-roll again too. 

What could I say, the girl was cute and her back felt good against my now rather chilly chest. 

She punched a code into the keypad that had emerged on the wall and a sudden harsh shuddering shook me out of my lewd thoughts. 

The entire doorway shifted upwards with the clanking hiss of steam-powered motors. The doorway had turned into an elevator, propelling us up from the floor of the club into some sort of attic space above the dance floor. 

The heat returned instantly, not as harsh as it had been outside but still substantial enough to make the contact between my chest and her back instantly uncomfortable and clammy. 

Fortunately, she stepped out of the lift as soon as it stopped moving. 

"Where exactly are we?" I asked, "Is this the point you turn around and tell me everything that we've spoken about so far has been nonsense and you're going to kill me now?"

She crooked an eyebrow at that comment. 

"Bit of a paranoid one you, aren't yah?" She snorted before shaking her head, "No, this isn't where I kill you, that would be a total waste of time considering I've brought you all this way. I could have killed you at literally any point along the way, why would I do it here and now?"

"I was kidding, you wouldn't be able to kill me even if you gave it your all," I said with a smirk. 

Okay, I was being a little bit cocky. But so far I hadn't seen anything that implied anyone down in the lower city could take me on, unless the drane who ran the pub I'd gone into was as strong as the doctor and Dan had implied back up in the upper city. 

Even then the mechanical human would have probably had to put some serious work into it. 

"Anyway, if you aren't murdering me, what are we doing here?" I asked, gesturing to the empty room. 

That was her turn to smirk. 

She raised a hand and clicked, causing everything in the room to change in an instant. 

A holo system like the one projecting the colour blue onto the walls of the club outside flared into life, though this one was aimed at the entire room that we were standing in. 

The walls of the room flickered away, replaced by a verdant grassy field, with rolling hills and three twinkling stars shining up above. 

This was the surface of the planet when it wasn't being scorched by one of the three suns in a closer orbit. Something that many of the people down in the undercity had probably never had the chance to see. 

In the centre of the room a large round table flickered into being, it looked to be made of high-quality wood with golden inscriptions surrounding the outer rim of the object. Once again it was something that could never survive down in the depths of the Furnace, and so would have been immensely desirable to anyone who had lived down here all their lives. 

There were two chairs set up next to the table, little more than stools made out of some kind of rock, but as the hologram spun up those too were made to look like fancy wooden chairs. 

"This is the conference room," The woman said, "And it's where you'll be meeting the leaders of the resistance." 

"So there is a resistance, I knew it!" I said, a grin forming on my face. There was no way that you could shove a bunch of humans down at the bottom of a planet and not expect at least some of them to get a little bit antsy at their lot in life.

"Yeah, there's a resistance, and I'm one of its leaders. You were lucky I plucked you off the street, walking around like some kind of topsider," She shook her head, "Anyway, take a seat and I'll ping the rest of the group, let them know we're ready to start." 

I did as she asked and sat on the chair, for a piece of concrete masked by holograms it wasn't actually too uncomfortable. 

With a deep breath I prepared myself, I needed to make a good impression here if we were going to get anywhere going forward.