Terminal White

by James Axler

  Kane was kitted out as a Magistrate, assigned a beat in the west tower of the ville. He nodded once in understanding as he was issued these instructions by a similarly emotionless man in a long white coat like a doctor’s.

  “There is no trouble in Ioville,” the man assured Kane, “but the patrol is needed for security. There is a lot of a sensitive material being held and built here, and enemies of the barons are keen to acquire it. As such you must always be on your guard on behalf of the barons.”

  “On behalf of the barons,” Kane repeated, staring into the middle distance of the quiet, gray-walled room.

  “You may be called upon, on occasion, to patrol the exterior of the ville,” the man continued, “but that assignment will be explained to you at a separate time. You will also receive other designated tasks, which you will perform to the best of your abilities. These will be assigned to you once you have been shown your residence.”

  Kane said nothing, taking on board the man’s points without a word.

  “You are expected to perform all duties at all times as though a baron was there with you, watching you,” the whitecoat explained. “Remember that always. Do not slide in your perseverance or dedication. Otherwise you will be retrained and assigned to another primary task. The role of Magistrate is an honour. You act as the baron now, your authority only superseded by the Supreme Magistrate’s. Do you understand?”

  Kane nodded once solemnly. Kane no longer. Magistrate 620M exited the room and was met by a male with graying hair and a stooped walk. Kane eyed the man aggressively, wondering at his walk—was this acceptable in Ioville, this walking like a hunchback? He would need to consider this once the man had performed his duty.

  The man introduced himself as Citizen 091M and explained that it was his duty to show Kane to his residence. Together, they ascended in an elevator that took them up to Cappa Level, where the Magistrates had their operational hub and training facilities. The two of them disembarked the elevator car and walked down one of the gray-white corridors in silence, Kane easily keeping pace with the stooped man who seemed to drag his heels.

  They came to a bank of compartment doors, which opened onto single-room sleeping quarters featuring a bed, a computer terminal and a shelf containing a surgically clean glass and a book detailing the Program of Unification. Citizen 091M led Kane to one of the rooms and showed him inside.

  “This is where you shall sleep,” Citizen 091M explained, standing to the side of the doorway.

  Kane nodded. “Acceptable.”

  “Sleep is designated to last 6.2 hours,” Citizen 091M informed Kane. “After that, you will be assigned your next task, which you will be expected to begin immediately.”

  Kane nodded again. “Acknowledged.”

  “Further information is contained in your task pack,” the gray-haired man told the Magistrate, indicating a gray-covered book that had been placed on the flat pillow of the bed. “You may call on me if you have any questions, I reside at Room 147, Residence Block 9, Level Delta.”

  Kane stood in his new room, his eyes still fixed on his advisor.

  “Is there anything else, Magistrate?”

  “Do you need to be examined, Citizen 091M?” Kane asked. “Your walk seems uncomfortable.”

  Citizen 091M thought for a moment. “One of the barons will instruct me if I require examination or surgery,” he replied.

  “And if they are not available?” Kane pursued.

  “Supreme Magistrate Webb holds the authority to make a decision in their stead,” the man told him before turning on his heel and departing back down the corridor toward the bank of blank-walled elevators.

  Now alone, Kane stood stiffly in place as he examined the room. It featured walls of a dirty, washed-out white, a white shelf, a white computer terminal and dull gray covers on the bed. It felt entirely adequate. This was home now for Magistrate Citizen 620M. This was home now for Kane. He was content.

  * * *

  CITIZEN 618M HAD given little thought to the man who had invaded his apartment and grabbed him. He could have overpowered the man with the cropped dark hair and the blue-gray eyes, but the stranger had evaded his grasp and run, and so Citizen 618M had called for the Magistrates, as was protocol.

  Now Citizen 618M was in a repair shop on Zeta Level, far below Epsilon, the traditional bottom of a ville. Citizen 618M was working on the panel repair of the chassis of one of the snow machines. The machines ran in vast circuits around Ioville, absorbing the moisture in the air, chilling it and producing snow in continuous streams. The ville also sent a pulse spike into the atmosphere every hour, which helped chill the area and seed the clouds with enough moisture that they would snow almost without cessation. The result was an ongoing snowstorm that had lasted almost six years.

  Citizen 618M was satisfied in his work. He needed his brawn—his muscle—to batter out the dents in the side of the panels, and he was able to lift more than most of the other citizens who worked here. They did not speak—there was no need. Their tasks required no negotiation, no discussion; they were set out and performed in strict order, with each man working at his own set function.

  Citizen 618M had another name once, not so long ago. That name was Grant and his functions as Grant had been very different. If he remembered that life it was at a stage once removed from himself now, like remembering a film one had seen or a painting once admired. It was the memory of a story.

  Grant/Citizen 618M struck his hammer along the metal panel of the snow wagon, flattening out the dents that the vehicle had received in the rough terrain outside Ioville walls. He was content.

  * * *

  CITIZEN 619F HAD been inducted into the ville at the same time as Citizen 618M. When she had entered the ville she had been called Brigid Baptiste and he had been called Grant, but now he was Citizen 618M and she was Citizen 619F and any thought of her past life was forgotten.

  Citizen 619F pushed at her long red hair self-consciously as the day’s tasks were outlined by the supervisor. There were twenty of them in the work crew, divided into four even groups, with each group tasked to work together to construct Sandcat vehicles.

  “You are to check all work twice before confirming that it is complete,” the supervisor—a gray-overalled woman with short blond hair in a pixie cut—intoned. “Errors cost lives, so make none.”

  Citizen 619F got to work, marching with her crew to the wide conveyor belt where the premolded Sandcat chassis would be delivered from the workshop behind this area. The thought of the stranger in her apartment was barely a whisper now, already almost forgotten by her occupied, even-keel mind. Citizen 619F was content.

  Communiqué to Ioville Magistrate 620M:

  Any weapons used by a Magistrate are his responsibility for the duration of his shift. Weapons are to be field stripped and reconstructed in the Magistrate’s own time.

  Message ends.

  Chapter 18

  Seventy-two hours had passed since anyone from the CAT Alpha field team had made contact with Cerberus. There had been no further word from Kane, Grant or Brigid, no reignition of their biolink transponders, no clue where they had gone. It was as though they had quite simply dropped off the map.

  Now, in a desolate, snow-dappled field, fifty miles from a place still called Whitecourt in spite of all the devastation and changes wrought upon the North American landmass in the past two hundred years, two figures stepped unobserved from a rent in space, appearing as if out of nowhere.

  The figures emerged from the momentary haze of the quantum window seen between the falling snowflakes. They were the chalk-skinned albino, Domi, and a man called Edwards, an ex-Magistrate who had been a field operative for Cerberus for several years. Edwards was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early thirties, with rippling muscles and hair shaved down to a brief fuzz of shadow. His short hair drew at
tention to his bullet-bitten right ear, a memento from an adventure several years before.

  Both Cerberus personnel wore shadow suits augmented with civilian clothes suitable for the cold weather of the north, fur-lined hoods pulled high and cinched close to their faces. The snow began to settle on their hoods and shoulders and in the creases of their clothes in seconds, creating narrow white streaks all over them as they stepped onto the snow. To a casual observer, they would look like any other travelers, with their tired clothes and carrying their possessions on their backs. However, Edwards’s backpack contained tracking equipment that could be instantaneously linked back to the Cerberus headquarters through a dedicated satellite uplink, while the other pack, which Domi had strapped to her back, featured a specially molded interior within which the interphaser unit rested when not in use.

  The rent in space from which they emerged looked like a blossoming lotus flower, budding into existence from nowhere with one hundred different colors swirling in its impossible depths where lightning flashed like witch fire. The budding lotus appeared to mirror itself, creating a second swirling triangle beneath it—existing impossibly beneath the ground and yet still visible to the human eye—if any such eye had been there to observe its rapid materialisation. This was the quantum window generated by the interphaser, a method of instantaneous transportation available almost exclusively to the Cerberus personnel. This window had formed over a scrap of ground where once tribal elders from the North Plains Indians had communed and, long before that, where primitive man had felt fear without knowing why. Such were the places where the interphaser, that incredible bit of technology made available to the Cerberus operation through the diligent efforts of Lakesh and his scientists, could access, transporting an individual to a new location instantaneously.

  The interphaser was in fact based on an alien artifact that could tap the quantum pathways and move people through space to specific locations. While more amenable than the stationary mat-trans, the alien technology of the interphaser was limited by certain esoteric factors. The full gamut of those limitations had yet to be cataloged, but what was known was that the interphaser was reliant on an ancient web of powerful, naturally occurring energy lines that stretched across the globe and beyond. These invisible pathways could be accessed at key locations that were called parallax points. This network followed old ley lines and formed a powerful technology so far beyond ancient human comprehension as to appear magical. In some ways, the interphaser operated along the same principles as the mat-trans, but its logic was more obtuse to modern eyes. As one might expect, the interphaser’s destination points were often located in temples, graveyards or similar sites of religious value. These sites had grown up around the interphaser’s use, ancient man sensing the incredible power that was being tapped for such instantaneous travel.

  Cerberus personnel’s access to an operational interphaser was the combined work of Brigid Baptiste and Cerberus scientist Brewster Philboyd, and had taken many months of trial and error to achieve.

  Edwards took a deep breath of the chill air, noting his surroundings with the alertness of a trained military man entering a known hostile environment. The snow was hard-packed underfoot. “Looks like we got here just in time to miss piss all,” he said grimly, commenting on the lack of any signs of human habitation.

  Behind him, the interphase window closed, dematerialising as though it had never been there. Domi shrugged out of her backpack and leaned down, reaching for the interphaser. “Desolate is good,” she reminded Edwards as she watched the unit power down. “Less chance of being seen.”

  The interphaser was a foot-high pyramidal structure with a mirrored silver finish. Its surface seemed to be almost liquid to the naked eye. Domi took the unit and set it in the molded case she had brought with her before replacing it on her back.

  “Yeah, that’s all to the good,” Edwards grumbled as he pulled his Beretta 93R pistol from his hip holster. Less than ten inches in length but accommodating a rate of automatic fire of 1,100 rounds per minute in 3-round bursts, this compact pistol could do a vast amount of damage for its size. Edwards never traveled anywhere unarmed. “But let’s not start walking around with our eyes closed just yet.”

  Domi nodded solemnly in agreement. She, too, was armed—in her case with a Detonics Combat Master with a silver finish as well as a fighting knife, which she had carried with her since her days as a sex slave in Cobaltville, long before joining the Cerberus setup. Her knife featured a serrated six-inch blade that had tasted blood more times than Domi had kept track of. She reached out with her heightened senses, searching for any threats hidden by the falling snow.

  Edwards logged in with Cerberus operations, confirming their arrival as he consulted a handheld tracking device to find the last known location of Kane’s team. Domi trotted after him, catching up in a few moments but keeping a good six feet between them to make it that little bit harder should someone try to pick them off from a distance.

  Putting a man on the ground had been a difficult decision. Lakesh had certainly wanted to get someone out here once CAT Alpha had lost contact and disappeared from the Cerberus surveillance system, but at the same time he was wary of moving too soon and jeopardizing the op before it had even begun. Thus, for three days the comms experts in the Cerberus redoubt had run through protocol, attempting contact with their missing team once every four hours, using several communication systems in case their colleagues were unable to respond with words. At the same time, Donald Bry and Brewster Philboyd had repositioned the satellites to focus on the area in question, the hidden snowy plains of British Columbia, but to no avail—the ongoing storm proved impenetrable to even the fiercest satellite sweep and no additional information could be garnered by remote.

  Thus, on the third morning, the conclusion had been reached that an observation squad be sent out on a recce of the area. Domi and Edwards were under strict orders to observe and to locate their colleagues, but not to engage with anyone else unless they absolutely had to. Edwards had something of a reputation for creating static in these situations, while Domi was a law unto herself. At the same time, they were probably the most capable field agents that Cerberus had with Kane, Grant and Brigid lost.

  Snow fell in aimless, wayward spirals, fluttering down to earth on the chill breeze as Edwards and Domi trekked across the barren landscape toward the last known location of their colleagues.

  “Brewster said that they left the Mantas somewhere around here,” Edwards stated, reading from the handheld tracking unit, “before checking out the zone on foot.”

  He began setting up the more advanced tracking system, which he had packed in component form in his backpack. The tracker featured the ability to run tests on the whole gamut of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as containing a signal booster for radio communications.

  While Edwards set up the analysis unit, Domi looked bleakly around. Stretching in every direction all that could be seen was the white blanket of snow. It covered trees and bushes and the gradually undulating ground, obscuring every detail with its chill whiteness. “How close are we to where they set down?” Domi wondered.

  “Mile, mile and a half maybe,” Edwards said, powering up the little unit he had unpacked. The unit stood six inches high and a little wider than it was tall; and it looked reminiscent of an old-fashioned radio set with a small, circular screen molded off-center on its front panel. “Brewster couldn’t get more specific—satellite tracking had lost them in the storm by the time they set down. Maybe we’ll have more success.”

  A man on the ground could see much more than a satellite, especially with the ever-present storm restricting the view from above to anywhere between three and zero percent of optimum.

  Edwards set the tracking unit to Scan, wedging it in place in the snow. Then he stood, letting out a slow breath that hung in the air like fog. Domi had already padded off, checking the immediate area
in her own way, searching for evidence of her allies’ disappearance and for clues as to their whereabouts now. Edwards was momentarily surprised that he could not see her through the falling curtain of snow, and he calmly fired up his Commtact to call to her.

  “Domi? You wandered off or you been kidnapped?”

  “Just wandered off,” Domi responded in a playful tone. Her voice came back to Edwards marred by static, the effect of all that snow coupled with the satellite bounce required even for a signal to transfer a few dozen feet, even using the signal booster on the tracking device.

  “See anything?” he asked, turning on the spot to try to locate the albino girl.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  Edwards went back to the sensor scan, eyeing the circular screen. The screen featured just two tones, gray and black, and interpreted a scan of the immediate area surrounding the tracking unit, running a basic sweep pattern and widening the field of scan with each rotation. Edwards saw a black blip showing very close by, and realized it was Domi checking out the immediate area. The screen showed nothing else—no Mantas; no life signs; nothing.

  Close by, Domi continued to check the area. She was a tracker by nature, more at home in the open wilderness than she would ever be in the fussy and restricting corridors of the Cerberus redoubt. She applied her keen senses the way a chef flavours a dish—instinct and combination, reacting to one element and countering another. But there was no sign of the Mantas, and certainly no sign of Kane, Grant or Brigid.

  “Nothing,” Domi muttered, picking up a handful of snow and letting it sift through her pale fingers.

  * * *

  WHILE DOMI WAS out there searching, Edwards paced around the tracking unit, peering through the snow cover. It was hard to see out here. Kane or Grant or the redhead could be twenty yards away and he might not even see them. Heck, they could be twenty feet away!

  Edwards engaged his subdermal Commtact again, speaking aloud. “Kane? Grant? You out here? You read me? Brigid? Brigid Baptise? This is Edwards, please respond.”