by James Axler
Kane huffed in pain and surprise, kept hold of his grip on the blaster, but his aim was lost.
Webb followed up his attack with a whirring punch to the side of Kane’s head, the blow ringing in Kane’s ear even as he staggered forward.
“You’re on the losing side, son,” Webb snarled as Kane stumbled on the rail-less catwalk, teetering close to the edge and that deadly drop into the whirling blades of the fan. “Terminal White is the future for mankind. Petty squabbles like this one are to be relegated to history forever.”
Regaining his balance, Kane dipped low and swung out with his left fist, swiping for the gray-haired Webb. The older man stepped aside, bounding on his feet like a prize fighter, impossibly nimble.
“People need to choose,” Kane snarled. “Free will—”
“Free will is a concept as outdated as the dinosaurs,” Webb hissed, leaping at Kane and delivering a vicious kick to the Cerberus warrior’s gut.
* * *
BRIGID LEAPED FROM the gunner’s seat as the Deathbird struck the front end of the Sandcat, scrambling into the cabin as the vehicle shuddered and began rolling backward with the impact. The words “Mary had a little lamb” played in her ears again, too close and too loud even over the sound of the explosion. The front of the Sandcat burst into sudden flame and the windshield was turned into a pane of searing heat.
Brigid looked around, searching for the side exit, away from the burning front of the vehicle. She pulled the door back only to be greeted by the ratatat of bullets that ricocheted around, narrowly missing her.
“Shit,” Brigid muttered, pulling the door shut again. It was armored, and that armor should hold off the attack for a few seconds at least. Outside, the remaining Sandcat must be targeting this one because of its proximity to the fallen Deathbird, making sure of the kill.
Grant, Brigid thought with a pang of regret. He might just have survived—the Deathbirds were well armored and designed to protect the pilot. But he wouldn’t last long—not unless she did something—and nor would she.
Brigid looked all around her, searching for an option. Bullets rattled against the side of the Sandcat, flames licked at the front. Brigid’s eyes fixed on the rear, where the armored back panel protected the interior from any assault. She remembered the work she had been assigned in the factory, Designated Task #004—Manufacturing. Brigid had worked these back panels dozens of times, secured them, removed them, checked them and attached them all over again, all part of her routine as a productive citizen of Ioville. She reached for the cabin repair kit without even looking, snatched the box from its housing against the port-side wall above the fire extinguisher. In a second, she had the tool kit open and had removed the screwdriver, tossing the rest of the contents and the box aside with a clatter.
Crouching down, Brigid worked at the screws with practiced haste as the sound of gunfire rattled all around her. She glanced back just once to eye the grounded chopper, saw its dark lines peering through the flames that had taken hold of the front of the Sandcat.
In moments, she had the panel unscrewed, discarding the screwdriver and pulling the heavy metal plate toward her in the same swift movement. The panel fell toward her with ease, and Brigid shuffled back on her haunches, letting it drop to the deck with a clang.
A moment later Brigid wriggled out from the open back of the Sandcat, ducking down as bullets flew all around her. She scrambled away from the burning vehicle, creating as much space as she could before the fire hit the fuel tanks and it went up in flames. It did so just five seconds after Brigid exited, the shockwave sending her crashing into the snow.
With the explosion, the sound of gunfire came to an abrupt halt.
* * *
KANE STUMBLED BACK, once again too close to the guardless edge of the catwalk, the spinning fan roaring beneath him.
“A few decision makers,” Webb spit. “That’s all that mankind needs. Everyone else will follow.”
“Because you force them to,” Kane growled, circling a few steps away from the drop, keeping his eyes on Webb.
The Supreme Magistrate looked almost amused at Kane’s words, amused and angry. “That’s man’s history, Kane,” he retorted. “The leaders who make their decisions by force, ensuring everyone follows for their own good.”
“Not me,” Kane muttered, shaking his head. He raised the tranq gun, pointing it at Webb. “I’m closing this hellhole down and taking you in.”
Webb smiled then, an ugly show of teeth on his drained face. “Taking me in?” Webb said with evident delight. “Listen to yourself, Kane—you’re a Magistrate through and through. You can never escape that.”
Kane glared at Webb, sighting down the barrel of his blaster. “Hands where I can see them, asshole.”
Webb raised his arms slowly, hands open to show that they were empty. “You have such potential, Kane,” he said. “You broke away from the baron’s regime, broke my conditioning here with Terminal White. The future needs good men to lead the masses. You could be one, if only you can set aside this insanity and let me show you.”
Kane heard the words and for a moment he wanted to trust Webb. He felt the wave of sympathy, of obedience, something inside him that said to trust the man who stood before him. It was Terminal White, he knew—that hidden program that sapped his free will, that sapped everyone’s free will.
“Put down the blaster, son,” Webb was saying. “There’s plenty for us to talk about, and a whole world waiting for good men to pull it back from the abyss.”
He knew it was a trick but still Kane lowered the tranq gun, the calming effect of the Supreme Mag’s words and his own sense of obligation setting in. He tried to remember why he shouldn’t trust this man, why he should not trust his words.
“Put the blaster down,” Webb said again, and Kane lowered the weapon and loosened his grip, dropping it to the catwalk. It landed there with a clang of metal on metal.
“That’s it, son,” Webb said gently. “Now, why don’t you and I get out of here and start figuring out how to fix the mess that you and your old friends have caused.”
Citizen 620M nodded, a Magistrate and a citizen of Ioville once more. Webb strode across the catwalk, closing the brief distance between them.
* * *
BRIGID LAY IN the snow, ears ringing with the aftereffects of the explosion. After a few moments—she could not tell how long it had been—she became aware of a figure moving toward her, trudging through the snow and standing over her.
She looked up, groggy, her head pounding, and saw the gray-clad legs of a Magistrate.
“Are you okay, citizen?” the Mag asked. To Brigid’s ringing ears, the Mag’s words sounded like they were coming from the far end of a very long tube.
She could fake it, maybe, get drawn back to Ioville and potentially get sucked back into the whole Terminal White program that would destroy her identity. No, never that.
Brigid drew the blaster up from beneath her belly and fired, sending a 9 mm bullet up in the direction of the wavering silhouette of the Magistrate. The man leaped back in surprise, the bullet going far wide of his position.
Brigid watched as the Mag pointed his right arm at her, a gesture accompanied by the familiar sound of a Sin Eater powering from its hidden wrist holster.
* * *
WEBB WALKED ACROSS the catwalk to Citizen 620M.
Then Kane’s Commtact chirped to life, trilling the familiar refrain in his ear: “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.”
“Dammit,” Kane spit, realising what was happening and where—and who—he was.
Webb saw the change in Kane’s demeanor and had the presence of mind to step back even as Kane swung for him. He was quick but not quite quick enough.
The knuckles of Kane’s right fist
cuffed Webb across the jaw, and Kane was already turning around to target the older man again, drawing his left fist around for a vicious second blow. Kane’s follow-through slammed into Webb’s jaw, sending the man back on unsteady feet, his head reeling.
Kane came at him again, driving his right fist in a cross that powered into Webb’s torso like a pile driver, striking the man hard in the gut so that his feet almost left the deck.
Webb staggered backward, his left heel slipping over the edge of the catwalk. “You’re a fool, Citizen 620M,” Webb snarled, “and you will obey me. It’s all just a matter of time.” He took a step forward, away from the edge.
Kane stood before Supreme Magistrate Webb, and his eyes narrowed in anger. “People aren’t machines, Webb,” he said. “They have faults and foibles and sometimes, yes, they make wrong decisions and they fight.”
“Pah,” Webb spat. “We almost lost the world once. Man tried to kill himself in one grand nuclear suicide that almost aced every living creature on the planet. And you and your ilk want to go back to that?”
Kane stepped back, eyes searching the metal catwalk for his dropped blaster. He spied it lying a few feet away, strode across the catwalk toward it. “I’m taking you in,” Kane stated grimly, bending down to pluck the weapon from the deck.
Webb lunged at him then, leaping across the scant five steps to where Kane was plucking up the tranq gun, screaming in sheer frustration over the sounds of the whirring rotor blades. Kane turned and blasted, sending a projectile with flared fins and a pointed end at his attacker. The tranquilizer dart drilled through Webb’s dress uniform just below his breastbone, burying its nib into the inferior vena cava vein that ran up the center of his chest.
Webb staggered back at the impact of the dart, the momentum of his attack drained to nothingness. “Kane, you bloody fool,” he muttered, even as he stumbled back two short steps.
A split second later and Webb was falling, dropping over the edge of the guardless catwalk toward the fiercely spinning rotor blades of the air intake fan. Kane watched him drop, moved to grab him but already knew he was too late, the effect of Terminal White just slowing his reactions that infinitesimal amount so that he would never quite reach the plummeting man.
Webb dropped thirty feet until his fragile human body met with the spinning metal blades of the fan. It was over a moment later, blood and tattered clothing and hunks of bone and gristle flying in all directions as Supreme Magistrate Webb was diced into so much offal by the whirring blades.
Kane watched over the side of the balcony, disgusted by what he saw. The fan ground to a halt with a groan of straining mechanics, something jammed in its center stopping the ceaseless spin of the rotor blades. And where a man had been mere moments before, now there was just a bloody smear splashed up the circular walls, a red tribute to a pitiless idea called Terminal White.
Free will or no, all men die the same, Kane thought grimly, when they meet with destiny.
In his ear, the words of the familiar refrain began playing once again: “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow...”
* * *
BRIGID WATCHED AS the Magistrate drew his Sin Eater, powering it into his hand with a practiced flinch of the wrist tendons. Then his helmet and head exploded in a burst of blood and bone, and the Mag crashed to his knees in the snow.
“What th—?” Brigid asked, pulling herself up from the ground.
As the words left her mouth, Grant came trudging toward her, his broad shoulders and hulking form familiar, even obscured as they were by the falling snow. “One man in the last Sandcat,” he explained. “Saw him exit and followed. Guess he wanted to see whether any of his partners had survived after the Deathbird struck the other ’cat, and that’s how he found you.”
Brigid looked at Grant in confusion, the sense of relief welling inside her. “You saved me,” she said.
“From what I understand, you saved me from something worse,” he replied. “The whole brainwash thing,” he added when he saw the confusion on her soot-smeared face.
“I thought you’d died with the Deathbird,” she said.
“Almost did,” Grant told her. “Bailed out at the last second. Kicked the door open and just jumped.”
“Pretty risky,” Brigid said, struggling to process it all. “You could have died.”
“Figured ‘could have’ was better than ‘almost certain’ anyway,” Grant told her. He held out the blaster in his hand. “Lucky you gave me this.”
“Yeah,” Brigid said. “Lucky.” What else could she say?
Chapter 33
The fans had stopped turning. Ventilation was at a standstill and the whole of Ioville seemed suffused with a choking thinness of air. When Webb had plunged into the fan’s blades he had stopped the rotors and the intake had trailed off. Terminal White needed the constant intake of air to feed it and so feed the system. Without that, it began to stagnate fast.
Kane looked around the lifeless, empty corridors of Zeta Level, where he, Brigid and Grant were helping gather the remaining citizens of the ville before letting them back out into the wild and freedom. The snow machines had been halted, and enough Sandcats remained that the people would have transport over the icy plains until the snow began to thaw. The Sandcats would need to be disarmed, of course, but that could be done.
It would all take time, Kane knew. For the next few months, this area would remain a winter wonderland created by one deluded man in service to masters who had long since died.
Kane thought of Webb and how he had died, destroying the very system he had brought to life for all these years. The man had been doing his duty, however wrongheaded that duty may have been. Falling into the fan like that was a rotten way to die.
“Hey, Kane? You okay?” Grant asked as he helped usher another group of bemused citizens toward the waiting transports. Their mental programming was a mess now, but at least they were docile and open to taking orders.
Kane looked at Grant and grimaced. “Just thinking,” he said, before correcting himself: “Hoping.”
“Hoping for what?” Grant asked. “A better tomorrow?”
Kane shook his head. “That could have been any of us,” he said. “What Webb was doing here—could just as easily have been me or you recruited out of the Mag Division to head up this ghastly project to turn people into obedient drones.”
Grant nodded somberly. “It’s a sobering thought,” he agreed.
“Webb bought into it,” Kane continued, “did his duty, believed what he was doing was for the common good. He wasn’t a madman—he was just fed the wrong lies and got too caught up in his obligations to ever question them.”
“The evil of the barons seems to reach further than we ever imagined,” Brigid said as she joined her partners, overhearing the last of Kane’s speech.
“So what were you hoping?” Grant asked Kane after a moment.
“I shot Webb with a tranq,” Kane recalled. “I’d hoped to bring him in, close this place down, maybe rehabilitate the man behind it. But he slipped and he fell into the fan before I could...” His voice trailed off. “I just hope that that tranq had kicked in by the time he struck the blades. Because, whatever all this was, however easy it is for us to step back and say we stopped a great evil, no man deserves that death. No Magistrate—not one just doing his duty.”
Grant bowed his head, his expression fixed and grim. “Amen, brother,” he said. “Amen.”
* * *
CAT ALPHA RETURNED to the Cerberus redoubt shortly after, exhausted mentally and physically, the whole experience under the thrall of Terminal White hanging over them like a heavy cloud. Back home, Kane assured his companions that he intended to sleep for a week, and nothing short of the end of the world was going to wake him.
“Time for a drink before you turn in?” Grant asked as
they trudged through the cave-like corridors of the redoubt. “Maybe a bite to eat, too?”
Kane looked from Grant to Brigid and nodded. “Yeah,” he announced. “Feels like I’ve been eating day-old leftovers for the past few weeks.”
“Nutritious goop,” Brigid said. “Trust me, I know. I was the one preparing it.”
The three of them entered the Cerberus canteen, a vast room of plastic-covered tables and fixed seats, and halted. There, over a dozen personnel were enjoying a respite from their shift, including Lakesh, Brewster Philboyd, Donald Bry and Reba DeFore. Each of them was dressed in the plain white jumpsuit that was the uniform of the Cerberus facility, with the blue vertical zipper running up its center. Despite their physical differences, it made everyone look the same.
“My dearest friends,” Lakesh called, spying Kane and his team standing at the open door to the canteen. “Come over, join us. We were just discussing your mission report.”
Kane turned to his companions, his face the picture of doubt. “I think maybe we’ve all had enough of hanging around matching suits for one day, huh?”
Brigid and Grant laughed in agreement before pushing Kane ahead of them and into the throng of their trusted—and occasionally uniform—colleagues.
* * * * *
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ISBN-13: 9781460375815
Terminal White
Copyright © 2015 by Worldwide Library
Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.