Terminal White

by James Axler

  “Cannot or haven’t?” Lakesh mused.

  “Good point,” Brigid agreed.

  Philboyd took over then while Lakesh recruited computer expert Donald Bry to set up his voice on loop reciting the nursery rhyme that he had discussed with Brigid.

  Brigid explained how they had hijacked the broadcast signal of Ioville, using that to penetrate the artificial storm and contact Cerberus. The signal would run through the Commtacts, but it had to be set at the one frequency and it was awash with static.

  “We’re still not picking up your transponders,” Philboyd told Brigid, running a diagnostics check on the relevant equipment in parallel with the discussion. “Where are you?”

  There was a brief pause, then Kane’s voice came over the Commtact broadcast. “Kane here. Ioville is located within that damned snowstorm we came to investigate. Storm’s blocking all signals, I guess.”

  DeFore had joined Brewster Philboyd at his desk and she took up the headset and mic that Lakesh had vacated. “Are you well, Kane? What is the status of your team?”

  “Well, yeah,” Kane assured her. “Just a little confused. Can’t speak for Grant, though. Like Baptiste says, we’ve not had a chance to locate him yet.”

  “Kane, do you need anyth—?” Reba began but Kane’s next words cut her off.

  “You hear that? What the hell is that? Baptiste?” He evidently was not speaking to Cerberus now.

  “What is it?” Brewster asked urgently over the Commtact. “What’s going on there?”

  No one responded.

  * * *

  IN THE MAGISTRATE comms room, Kane turned to face Brigid, his brow furrowing in confusion and anger. “You hear that?” he asked.

  Brigid nodded. She heard it, too, although it was not like hearing, more like sensing, the way an animal senses the territory or presence of another animal.

  “What the hell is that?” Kane asked. “Baptiste?”

  Brigid closed her eyes and “listened” to the message playing inside her head. “Protocol Zero-zero-zero,” she said. “Core command, superseding any and all designated tasks with immediate effect. We are to gather in the Zeta Level garages where we will—”

  “—be armed,” Kane picked up, “and then sent forth—”

  “—in the name of the baron.” Both of them were speaking now, hearing the words in time.

  Kane looked at Brigid, wide-eyed. “Well, we should go.”

  “No, Kane, no,” Brigid said, shaking her head vigorously until her red tresses broke free from beneath her cap. “Remember who you are.”

  “Magistrate 620M,” Kane announced automatically.

  “No,” Brigid told him, grabbing him by the tops of his arms and pulling her face close to his. “Listen to me. You are Kane—you are a warrior in the Cerberus organisation. What you’re experiencing right now is a trick to stop you thinking.”

  In the corridor outside, Brigid could hear the sounds of marching feet as the Magistrates on Cappa Level followed the order, making their way toward the elevators and from there down to Zeta Level.

  “I need to go,” Kane said in confusion. “We need to be at Zeta—”

  “No, we don’t,” Brigid told him. “You are Kane.”

  “I’m...” Kane screwed his eyes closed as he tried to get a fix on Brigid’s words. He kept hearing the command in his skull, compelling him to join the rest of the ville in Zeta Level where the Sandcats awaited, ready to start a grand push into the Outlands. “...needed,” Kane finished, turning to walk out of the room.

  Brigid reached for him, pulling him back, but he shrugged her away. He was in the thrall of the Supreme Magistrate now, under the command of Protocol Zero-zero-zero.

  Chapter 27

  In the Cerberus operations room, Mohandas Lakesh Singh was questioning Brewster Philboyd from two desks over, where Singh had been working with Donald Bry on the looped transmission that Brigid had proposed.

  “What do you mean, you’ve lost them?” Lakesh demanded. “We were speaking to them just moments ago.”

  Brewster indicated his computer screen where the sine wave of the comms system showed as a luminescent line on a black background. “I’ve tried hailing them but they’re not responding,” Philboyd said. “It’s like they were called away mid-discussion.”

  Lakesh scratched his jaw thoughtfully, wondering what was best to do next. He turned back to Donald Bry, who was sitting at another computer terminal where he had been working with Lakesh. “Donald, is the Mary track ready?”

  Bry nodded, his mop of copper curls flopping over his eyes. “It is.”

  “Play it,” Lakesh instructed. “Pipe it through the Commtact frequency at four-minute intervals, as Brigid suggested.”

  Bry tapped in a string of commands on his computer keyboard, linking the prerecorded message to the comms system. Then he pressed Execute.

  * * *

  GRANT, OR Citizen 618M as he had been rebranded three weeks before, had heard the command run in his head, as had the other mechanics on Level Zeta. The transmission was carried via the unique air flow system of Ioville, sending the message into the mind of every citizen. Each blindly adhered to the instruction, and each had their own role in the activation of Protocol Zero-zero-zero.

  Grant marched with the colleagues, moving in absolute silence toward the main garage area. A set of quadruple doors towered before them, four times the height of a man, hinged in such a way that they folded in on themselves as they were drawn back into slots in the walls. Grant and the other mechanics worked the heavy doors, drawing them back toward their niches in the walls.

  Behind the doors, a cavernous room was revealed. Automated lights began to wink on as the doors were drawn back, bathing the room in blue-white brilliance. There, within the vast room, stood over three hundred Sandcats, painted white and factory-new, along with one hundred Deathbird helicopters lined up in a grand strip down the center of the room. Each vehicle was armed and fueled; each was ready to be activated.

  The Sandcats were arranged to face away from the gigantic doors, creating a neat line of back plates facing out toward Grant and his colleagues. The turret guns were all facing forward, the armaglass blisters glinting beneath the powerful illumination of the room, white streaks like crescent moons painting each lethal bubble.

  Grant and his crewmates marched through the vast lines of Sandcats and Deathbirds, eyes forward, splitting up as they made their way toward the distant doors that opened out onto the wilderness beyond the walls of Ioville, out into the world. Around them, the Sandcats and the Deathbirds powered up automatically, artificial positronic brains bringing them to life. Ioville had only approximately nine hundred citizens in total, and fully one-third of those were children. Each had been trained in the ways of the Magistrates, but they alone would not be enough to wage an assault on the moral decline of the outside world. Webb had foreseen this and had instructed that each vehicle have an automated system that could be applied as required, much as the snow wagons could function unmanned.

  Grant continued to pace toward the distant doors that would unleash this new assault on the world.

  * * *

  BRIGID WATCHED KANE reach for the door handle to the Magistrate comms room, following the instruction that surged into his mind like an injected drug.

  “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.”

  Both of them heard the words, spoken in Lakesh’s soft voice with a pleasant, lilting accent. The voice was playing in their heads, through the medium of their subdermal Commtacts.

  Kane halted, brows furrowing in confusion, his hand clenching the door handle.

  “Kane,” Brigid said, her voice barely a whisper.

  Kane turned to look at her, his brows still furrowed. After
a moment he smiled. “Baptiste,” he said. “I’m me. I’m me.”

  Brigid smiled then, too. “You heard the song,” she confirmed.

  “Yup, inside my skull,” Kane explained with a nod of his head.

  “That means Lakesh got it working,” Brigid said. “Think it’ll be enough to bring you back to reality?”

  Kane looked wary, his hand finally receding from the doorknob. “Let’s hope so.”

  Outside, the sounds of marching feet continued to echo down the corridor, Magistrates obeying the call to arms. The two Cerberus warriors knew they needed a plan then, and they needed one quickly.

  Brigid turned back to the comms desk, her eyes searching frantically across the board of lights and dials and buttons.

  * * *

  “MARY HAD A little lamb, its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.”

  Striding between two Deathbirds, Grant’s step suddenly wavered and he stopped in place.

  “What the hell—?” he muttered, shaking his head. He had heard the voice in his head, the children’s nursery rhyme playing through his skull.

  Around him, Grant could hear his fellow mechanics marching through the ranks of vehicles, keeping step as they made their way toward the external doors of the enormous garage level. He stepped back beneath the tail strut of the nearest Deathbird, ducking beneath it to hide himself as he tried to make sense of the words in his head.

  “Hello?” Grant said, muttering the word.

  Around him, something in the atmosphere, the very air itself, seemed to be telling him to get back to work, to get the vehicles prepped and ready to launch, to draw back the external doors and begin the assault on the broken world waiting beyond Ioville’s walls. But the other voice, the other words, rang in his ears like a taunt, filling him with doubt.

  * * *

  “THERE!” BRIGID SAID, jabbing her finger at a display panel on the vast control board of the Mag comms desk.

  Kane looked at the panel for a moment, then, realising he really had no idea what he was looking at, turned to question her. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Alpha Level,” Brigid said, translating the data stream that ran across one of the computer screens, “baronial suite. That’s where the broadcast is coming from—the one that’s instructing everyone to go to Zeta Level.”

  Kane huffed angrily. “Makes sense,” he said. “Damn baron had to be at the heart of this mess.”

  “Protocol Zero-zero-zero is a command to begin an assault on all enemies,” Brigid said, listening to the instructions running through her head in a solicitous whisper. “We have to stop this somehow, Kane.”

  Kane smiled grimly. “So we go to Alpha Level, block the broadcast, kill the baron...” He trailed off at Brigid’s look.

  “The command’s already in action,” she said. “Someone needs to get down there, to Zeta Level, and stop the assault from launching.”

  Kane nodded. “I’ll go find the baron on Alpha,” he said. “You think you can handle the war machine on Zeta?”

  “No,” Brigid said, a tremor of incredulity in her voice.

  Kane smiled grimly, clamping Brigid by the shoulders. “You’ll think of something, Baptiste,” he assured her.

  Then Kane reached for the door handle once again, pulling the door toward him and exiting the comms room. As he stood in the doorway he turned back to Brigid. “But think quick,” he said.

  Brigid nodded solemnly as Kane disappeared from sight. “Think quick,” she muttered to herself. “I guess that’s as good a plan as any.”

  With that, Brigid plucked up one of the fallen tranquilizer guns and exited the room, hurrying along the deserted corridor toward the bank of elevators that would take her down to Zeta Level.

  Chapter 28

  The metal doors slid closed as Kane entered, and then he stood surrounded by the gray walls of the elevator. He checked his blaster—just a tranq gun, no sign of his old Sin Eater, but then he had had no time to search for it. The ville must have weapons—the whole place was geared for war, Kane realized now, Sandcats and Deathbirds all armed and ready for some grand assault that only the Supreme Magistrate truly understood. Was there a baron up there, in Alpha Level? Kane wondered. The barons were all dead. Whoever was sending that signal to follow Protocol Zero-zero-zero was someone new, not a hybrid baron like the inhuman monsters he had spent so much of the past decade rebelling against.

  Kane waited as the elevator ascended, a grid of lights on the wall plate beside the door indicating his passage through the levels, from Cappa to Beta, then Beta to Alpha. There was no specific security protocol in place, but the elevator only went as far as Alpha Level, not right up into the towering suites assigned to the baron him or herself. To reach that area, Kane needed another elevator or he would walk.

  The elevator halted with a graceful hush of hydraulics. Alpha Level. Kane stepped to the side as the doors slid back, revealing a gray-walled corridor beyond. He had his blaster in his hand now, up and ready to fire. There were eight shots in the blaster, eight thick needles of tranquilizer that could be used to drop a foe without killing them. Kane hoped that would be enough.

  The corridor was empty. Kane ducked his head out, glancing along both directions to be certain no one was waiting to ambush him. There was nothing.

  He paced out into the corridor, scanned swiftly for the other elevator that would take him up higher into the restricted area. It was not obvious, nothing stood out. But there were stairs running up the side of the bank of elevators, going all the way through this central tower with its white cyclops-like eye that stared out across the ville like a sentry. Kane pushed the door open gently, making sure not to make too much noise. Then he stepped into the stairwell—white-walled with pockmarks in the concrete—and hurried up the steps, keeping his knees bent, his movements light and fluid.

  Two turns of the staircase and he was at the next level, a closed door waiting before him, white like the bland walls of the stairwell itself. Kane pushed against it, placing his ear to the door and listening. Nothing.

  He took the handle in his left hand, the blaster poised in his right, and pulled the door slowly back toward him, holding his breath. Nothing happened. The door pulled back with just a whisper of noise from its heavy hinges like a breath, and then Kane could see what lay beyond. It was a service corridor, with access to ventilation ducts and removable wall panels for wiring and pipe work. The walls were painted gray.

  Kane stepped out into the corridor and decided on a direction, pacing away from the stairwell door, alert to any danger. His pointman sense was on high alert now, that fabled, almost Zen-like ability to sense possible threats that remained unseen.

  And then—

  “Mary had a little lamb,” his Commtact blared, “its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.”

  Kane stopped, almost stumbling, such was the surprise that the silly tune had engendered within him. He waited for the music to pass, refocusing his mind on the situation at hand, reaching out with honed senses for any hint of movement that could spell ambush.

  A moment later he was at the end of the service corridor, a blind corner that turned out into the lobby of the baronial suite. Kane tensed, preparing to reveal himself to whoever waited beyond.

  * * *

  AS KANE ASCENDED through the ville, Brigid caught her own elevator car down into its very depths. She, too, was armed, having taken one of the discarded tranq guns from the unconscious Magistrates in the communications room. Having assured herself that the blaster was armed, she slipped it down into the large pocket of her gray overalls, pushing it back behind where her right arm fell. However, it would hardly stand up to scrutiny, as what pockets she had were not designed to hold a full-length blaster like this.

 
Brigid watched as the white lights on the wall plate moved, indicating her descent through the ville. Cappa, Delta, Epsilon. At Epsilon, the elevator car stopped and the doors drew back after a moment’s hesitation. Brigid stepped back to the farthest wall of the car, from where she could best see who entered and what lay beyond. Two people were waiting there, clad in gray uniforms with peaked caps drawn down over their hair. One was a man, taller than Brigid—taller than Kane, in fact—but lanky and undernourished, his thin wrists showing where his overalls were just too short in the arm. The other figure was a woman, gray haired with a face defined by its wrinkles, the puckering around her lips like the crags of a cliff face. They were nothing special, Brigid knew, just workers from the factories here, probably on a rest break when the alert had come through to follow Protocol Zero-zero-zero. Neither spoke to Brigid, nor did anything to really acknowledge her.

  They have been turned into dead people, Brigid told herself with disgust. Living dead, going through the motions of life, breathing and eating and moving, but with nothing else to their lives but the instructions laid out by the regime.

  Each regime throughout history had done this, in its own way, Brigid knew. Each regime had tricked and cajoled and forced people to behave in a certain way, filling their minds with dull buffers that weighed down their individualism, their real thoughts. Because thoughts were dangerous, Brigid knew. Thoughts were what brought the system to revolution, changed the structures of power.

  Brigid smiled as the nursery rhyme refrain began to trill through her ear canal via the Commtact. Today, her thoughts would be the most dangerous ones of all, and they would bring this whole sick project to its knees.

  She waited as the elevator descended farther, plummeting down to Zeta Level.

  * * *

  HIS BACK FLUSH against the wall of the service corridor, Kane peeked very carefully out into the lobby beyond. It was a wide area, walls painted white with two couches on opposing walls along with a desk between them, behind which an empty chair stood. Behind the desk there waited a tinted-glass wall containing a set of double doors.