by Mark Ellis
Before they got too close, Kane stepped hastily back into the corridor, pulling the door shut, dropping the locking bar back into place with a thud. Whirling on Reeth, he snarled between bared teeth, “You sick bastard! These are Dregs! You had no intention of smuggling them into the barony. What were you going to do with them?”
“I have other buyers in other places,” Reeth replied, voice quavering.
“Other baronies?” Grant rumbled.
“No, not exactly.”
“How do you transport the merchandise to these ‘other buyers’?” Kane demanded.
Reeth shook his head and droplets of blood flew from his face. “Don’t ask me that, sec man. You really don’t want to know”
Kane’s hand darted for Reeth’s throat, closed around it and he shoved the man against the wall, bouncing the back of his skull against the stone.
“I’m sick of this,” he hissed. “I’m under orders to serve a termination warrant on you, and you’ve given me no reason to delay it another second.”
“No, wait!” Reeth lifted a pair of trembling, conciliatory hands. “Listen to me, goddamn it!”
Reeth’s words tripped over each other in their haste to leave his lips. “I’m talking with a straight tongue now. You don’t want to know! You find out, and one night you’ll have termination warrant served on you!”
“You seem to forget who we are,” Kane said in a low, deadly monotone.
“You’re a Mag, just another of the baron’s sec men. There are forces a lot more powerful than you.”
“Show us.”
Snatching a gloveful of dreadlocks, Kane wrenched Reeth away from the wall and down the corridor. The man dug in his heels and tried to resist, but Kane jammed the bore of the Copperhead into his kidneys to turn him down the bend in the passageway.
The corridor ended abruptly at a barrier. Kane, using the dreadlocks like reins, yanked Reeth to a jolting halt. They faced a free-standing, egg-shaped chamber made of what looked like translucent smoked glass, about ten feet in height. It rested in the centre of a metal disk, elevated a foot above the floor. An inset series of lights glowed yellow and orange around the rim. On the outer skin of the chamber, they saw a square panel studded with two rows of numbered and lettered buttons, some blinking brightly.
Kane recognized the composition of the chamber as transparisteel, a preNuke invention sharing the properties of both normal glass and steel. It was rare but not unknown. He prodded Reeth with the Copperhead.
“Open it.”
Reeth groaned, tapped three buttons on the keypad and a door panel swung outward. Kane peered around Reeth, looking into the chamber. It was circular, like the hollowed-out interior of an eggshell, broader at the floor level. The smooth walls tapered to a rounded ceiling. He and Grant stared. It took both men a silent, confused moment to realize they had no idea what they were looking at.
The inner walls featuring the same smoke-tinted transparisteel as the exterior. An interlocking complex of disks patterned the floor. They shimmered faintly, a silvery, moonlight hue. Kane heard the most distant of electronic humming sounds, like a buried generator.
“What the hell is this?” Grant growled.
“Kane! Grant! Report!” Not only did they hear Salvo’s imperious tone in their helmets, but they heard it echoing down the corridor.
Reeth heard it, too, and his shoulders slumped in relief. “Listen,” he said in a pleading whisper, “if you value your lives, don’t tell Salvo I led you to the phase portal.”
Kane swung his head toward him. “The what?”
Reeth opened his mouth and then shut it again. His lips tightened, and his expression showed he intended to say no more despite what was done to him.
“Let’s go,” Grant urged gruffly, tugging at Kane’s elbow.
Reluctantly Kane allowed himself to be drawn away from the chamber. He, Grant and Reeth walked quickly along the passageway, through the doorway and into the big room that had served as Reeth’s control centre. He saw Salvo standing like a red-faced statue beside the electronics console, and tension cut at him like a knife. His heart jumped, picking up a faster rhythm and holding on to it. Pollard and MacMurphy patted down the blastermen, who stood in grim silence, hands behind their heads.
Pointing to Reeth, Salvo said, “Let him go.”
Kane released his grip on the dreadlocks, and Reeth stumbled slightly. He rushed toward Salvo, hands wide. Angrily, petulantly he said, “I don’t know what’s going on, what put the bug up your ass, but we can work this out before the baron gets wind of—”
The Sin Eater slid into Salvo’s palm, and two shots roared, sending out almost tangible waves of sound. Reeth kicked backward from the floor, as though performing an acrobatic trick. It was no trick. A huge crimson blotch appeared on the front of his bodysuit.
The two rounds smashed through Milton Reeth’s chest and heart. He slapped down onto the floor with a mushy thud. Blood from haemorrhaging lungs bubbled from his nose and mouth. He made a very small gurgling noise, like a baby waking from a nap. Then he died, lying on his back, eyes open and bright as marbles. An angry grumble went up from the blastermen, but Pollard and MacMurphy had them covered.
Pushing the Sin Eater back into its forearm holster, Salvo announced, “Termination warrant served.”
Staring at Kane, he said loudly, “Flash-blast this slag-hole.”
Kane said, “There are more outrunners in a cell back there—”
He stopped speaking when he saw the cold smile play over Salvo’s face. He knew what the bastard intended.
“I repeat—flashblast this slaghole.” Salvo’s voice sliced through the air like a metal whip. “Do we understand each other?”
Seconds of silence hung in the air. Kane realized Salvo was challenging him, reminding of the line he dared not cross. Salvo may have led the team into a trap, but Kane and Grant had disobeyed orders, and the superior officer was again in charge, letting everyone know it.
Kane inclined his head in a slight nod. “Sir.”
Salvo nodded in return, so slight a motion it was almost invisible. He had scored a minor victory. “You and Grant wait for us in the tunnel while we mop up in here.”
Crossing the room, Kane and Grant walked up the staircase to the scaffold and along the tunnel. Blocking the transceiver grid with a finger, Grant put the edge of his hand against the base of his neck. “I figure we’re up to here in it. What do you think?”
Kane smiled distractedly, and then placed a finger over the microphone on his own helmet. “What did Reeth call that room? A portal?”
“Yeah. Whatever the hell that means.”
“Remember the old stories? About preNuke experiments...right after Night Eternal, some of them were discovered in Strongholds...they were called portals, right?”
“Folklore,” Grant replied stiffly. “Legends.”
“Could be. Or could be there’s a basis in reality for the legends.”
Grant tapped his chin with the edge of his hand. “You mention that to Salvo, and we’ll be in it up to here.”
Kane chuckled uneasily. “Don’t worry. I’ve already had enough swimming in shit for the day.”
From behind them erupted the staccato hammerings of three Sin Eaters on full auto. The sound rolled down the tunnel, carrying with it faint cries and bleats of terror and pain. The outcries stopped, but the Sin Eaters continued to blast. They heard the clatter of spent casings clattering to the floor, the shattering of glass, the clanging of metal. Sparks showered as the generator was cored by armour-piercing rounds. The neon light strip overhead flickered and went out. The snarl of the Sin Eaters stopped.
Even with only the one-color night vision supplied by his helmet, Grant saw Kane’s jaw muscles knot and bunch. “Forget it,” he said quietly. “They’re only outrunners, most of ‘em Dregs and slaggers. They’re better o
ff.”
Bitterly Kane intoned, “Mag’s mercy.”
Within a couple of minutes, Salvo, MacMurphy and Pollard emerged from below and into the tunnel. Salvo stalked past Grant and Kane without a word or a glance. They fell into step behind him.
Salvo issued no orders, and no one asked him any questions. They left the ancient fortress by the same way they had entered it, cutting across the courtyard to where they had left Carthew. He was groggy from the drugs, but the pain of his injury was under control. Led by Grant, he was able to walk out of the dark ruins.
As the team entered the canyon, Kane automatically checked the chron inside the wrist of his left gauntlet. Over three hours had elapsed since they left the barony. As far as he knew, Salvo hadn’t transmitted a status report back to the division, so if the mission had been strictly by the book, a backup Bird squadron should be arriving at that very moment.
Kane wasn’t surprised to see only three choppers still squatting on their skids. A backup was nowhere in sight, either overhead or on the ground.
The team climbed back into their respective Deathbirds. Grant powered up the engine. It whined, coughed and caught. The vanes spun, agitating the dust of the canyon floor into swirling eddies.
Slowly the craft lifted off, rising vertically until it topped the uppermost rim of the ramparts of Mesa Verde canyon. Grant’s practiced hand rotated it gracefully, and then sent it winging through the night. This time Salvo’s Deathbird took the point of the delta formation.
It was only fitting, Kane reflected acidly. Old Salvo was returning from commanding another successful foray against the legions of chaos, of anarchy, of the sick and victimized. He thought about spitting, but he knew it would irritate the pilot, and he had made enough enemies for one evening.
CHAPTER FIVE
KANE LOOKED DOWN at the hellzone, gleaming a dull grey white in the moonlight. It was like looking upon Earth’s bare bones, scoured and bleached by nearly two centuries of chem storms and lingering radioactivity.
On the border of the zone, right at the edge of Terra Infernus, soil, humus and desiccated vegetation clung obstinately to an imitation of life. People, more than likely Dregs, still toiled and tilled down there, while the others, less than a hundred miles away, enjoyed the cake distributed to them by the benevolent Baron Cobalt.
Things had been different in antiquity, Kane knew. He couldn’t be sure how different or exactly in what way. The history he had been taught mostly covered events following Nukeday, and before that, before Night Eternal, it was dim and inexact. It was said in the texts that people had taken a savage joy in raping and ravaging the world, deaf to the entreaties of more-enlightened minds.
The population had been staggering in number, billions supposedly. Then came Nukeday, which had burned away eighty percent of them, and the subsequent horrors of geological catastrophes, fallout and a merciless retribution for the sins of humanity.
The world had suffered a dark age, though in actual chronological terms, the age had lasted only 100-plus years before the Program of Unification had been put into practice. With the cooperation of the nine most powerful barons, the program had reached a success point in a little less than a decade. Unity Through Action had been the rallying cry.
Part of the program had been education. People were taught that to be alive, to be a human, wasn’t a special privilege, since humanity had brought about an apocalypse and its near extinction. The hierarchy of barons was dedicated to preventing another such holocaust.
Their role as guides and protectors for humankind revolved around the same theme—people must never again be allowed to choose their own destinies, since invariably those choices led to disaster.
Kane swallowed a sigh. He didn’t understand why he should want things that were dead and buried and gone. The preNuke world had festered with hate and suspicion and pollution and war. It had taken the barons to clean it up the only way it could be cleaned up—by stamping out any deviation from the standard, forbidding all technology except to the very few elites who defined and maintained obedience to that standard.
Like me, Kane thought.
Within an hour, the red sky of Terra Infernus mellowed to a pale indigo at the horizon. The comforting lights of Cobaltville beckoned, and he couldn’t help but be glad of his return. He desperately wanted to shuck off his armour and wash away the bitter stink of the hellzone.
The Deathbirds soared steadily over the irrigated greenness of cultivated fields and over the silvery windings of the Kanab River, a tributary of the Colorado.
Kane looked down at the city spread below. Cobaltville was built on the bluffs overlooking the river. Towers and walls perched on the hills, looking like a gargantuan battleship somehow beached there. The stone walls rose fifty feet high, and at each intersecting corner protruded a Vulcan-Phalanx gun tower. Powerful spotlights washed the immediate area outside the walls, leaving nothing hidden from the glare. The bluffs surrounding the walls were kept cleared of vegetation except grass, a precaution against a surprise attack. One of the official reasons for fortifying the baronies was a century-old fear—or paranoid delusion—of a foreign invasion from other nuke-scarred nations. It had never happened, and Kane had always wondered how the barons figured any country could mount a large enough army to establish anything other than a remote beachhead.
Then there had been the threat of mutant clans, like the vicious Squidoos, unifying and sweeping across the country. The threat burned so brightly in the minds of the nine barons that a major early aspect of the Program of Unification had been a campaign of genocide against mutant settlements in baronial territories.
Inside the walls stretched the complex of spired Enclaves. Each of the four towers was joined to the others by pedestrian bridges. Few of the windows in the towers showed any light, so there was little to indicate that the interconnecting network of stone columns, enclosed walkways, shops and promenades was where nearly four thousand people made their homes.
In the Enclaves, the people who worked for the baronial administrators enjoyed lavish apartments. Every comfort was built into them—plumbing, artificial lighting, refrigeration, air-conditioning—all the bounty of those favoured by the baron. Kane and a few other Magistrates lived in the upper levels of the Enclaves.
Far below on a sublevel beneath the bluffs, light peeped up from dark streets of the Tartarus Pits. Although it was very late, the Pits were awake and seething. The narrow, twisting streets were crowded, neon light flashed luridly, making blacker the shadows of the alleys and lanes. These sectors of the baronies were melting pots, where outrunners and slaggers lived.
They swarmed with cheap labour, and random movement between the Enclaves and Pit was tightly controlled—only a Magistrate on official business could enter the Pits, and only a Pit dweller with a legitimate work order could even approach the cellar of an Enclave tower. However, Kane knew of at least one undetected route into the Enclaves.
The population of the Pits was as strictly and even more ruthlessly controlled than the traffic. The barons had decreed that the fortified city-states could support no more than three thousand residents, and the number of Pit dwellers could not exceed one thousand.
Kane retained vivid memories of making Pit sweeps, seeking unauthorized outrunners, infants and even pregnant women. He did not relish those memories.
Seen from above, the Enclave towers formed a latticework of intersected circles, all connected to the centre of the circle, from which rose the Administrative Monolith. The massive, round column of white rockcrete jutted three hundred feet into the sky. Light poured out of the slit-shaped windows on each level.
Every level of the tower was designed to fulfil a specific capacity E, or Epsilon, Level was a general construction and manufacturing facility; D, or Delta, Level was devoted to the preservation, preparation and distribution of food; and C, or Cappa, from an American version of the Greek Kap
pa, Level held the Magistrate Division. On B, or Beta, Level was the historical archives, a combination of library, museum and computer centre. The level was stocked with almost five hundred thousand books, discovered and restored over the past ninety years, not to mention an incredibly varied array of preNuke artefacts.
The work of the administrators was conducted on the highest level, Alpha Level. Up there, in the top spire, far above even the Enclaves, the baron reigned alone, unapproachable, invisible.
Kane had no clear idea what went on in A Level. The secrecy surrounding the baron and the administrators’ activities was deliberate and jealously guarded. Almost everybody in all the other divisions was kept in ignorance about the actual number and identities of the administrators.
Fraternization between division personnel was strongly discouraged, presumably so no one would know anything that the administrators didn’t want them to know.
Midway on the side of the monolith, a flat, massive slab began extending like a monstrous, squared-off tongue. A circle of fluorescent light blinked rhythmically on the exact centre of the slab. Grant angled the Deathbird down toward the landing pad projecting from the level housing the Magistrate Division and its dozen subsections.
Mechs scurried out of the cavernous opening on the side of the tower, securing the landing skids with cables attached to eyebolts sunk in the rockcrete. Medics rushed out and put Carthew on a wheeled stretcher, quickly rolling him inside. Kane and the team walked inside the monolith as giant groaning gears and squealing pulleys withdrew the landing pad.
The Magistrate Division level was huge, containing classrooms, a weapons range, a vast armoury, wardrooms, a cafeteria, a gymnasium and a computerized Intel centre. It also held dormitories for recruits.
Kane thought of his first morning at the division—when he was twelve—and how he awakened on his bunk before dawn, cold, frightened, yet strangely eager for the day to begin. Nineteen years had conditioned all childish fears and frailties from his mind and body. He remembered his final examination when he was sixteen, a day that marked his last day as a recruit and his first day as a badge-carrying Magistrate. There was no such thing as failure of the examination—those who survived it were the ones who didn’t fail.