by Mark Ellis
“What good will that do? Don’t you need some kind of accessing or operational code?”
Brigid tapped her forehead with a finger. “The file I found listed the codes. I committed all of them to memory.”
Sceptically Kane asked, “All of them?”
“All of them. I have an eidetic memory.” Seeing Kane’s blank expression, she added, “A photographic memory. I see something once, and I remember everything about it in detail. Even numerical sequences.”
A smile creased Kane’s lips.
“What?” she asked.
“Later, Baptiste. But keep on surprising me. I may be able to surprise you in return.”
They hurried off, darting down, then back up muddy lanes. Kane couldn’t keep the smile from returning to his face. An idea had sprung into his mind, full-blown. The plan was impossible, crazy, but it seemed absolutely lucid compared to the hopeless nightmare of the past couple of hours. Now, at least, there was a faint light of hope shining in the darkness of despondency. Of course, they still had to find a way to escape the barony undetected and reach the hellzone, but he was certain Guana Teague could offer up a few suggestions—especially if he believed his life was at stake. Which it certainly was.
The few people they encountered moved aside quickly, keeping their eyes cast down. On top of its other functions, Magistrate armour was an instant crowd-parter.
When Kane finally saw the warehouse looming up against the inner wall, the first thing he noticed was the open door. With Brigid behind him, he pushed it further open and stepped inside. Immediately, he knew something was wrong. He smelled it and he sensed it. His ebullience drained away, as if poured down a hole.
Turning to Brigid, he put his finger to his lips, and then filled his hand with the Sin Eater. She leaned into him, and he became acutely aware of her. Even through the armour, he could feel her heart pumping hard and fast. Whispering into her ear, he said, “Find some cover. No matter what you see or hear, don’t move.”
She said nothing, nor did she even nod. The gaze she gave Kane was the same wary look she might cast toward a tiger, if she came across one in her living quarters. It was a look Kane recognized. He had slipped into his Magistrate persona as easily as he had slipped into his armour, and she sensed the change in him.
Brigid followed the line of the wall, found a stack of boxes in a cobwebby corner and crouched down behind them, hands around her knees.
Kane crept deeper into the warehouse, sidling into the shadows cast by stacks of crates. He followed his nose. The whiff of blood and cordite smelled fresh. Peering around the edge of an open box of machine parts, he spied a flat ribbon of scarlet oozing over the flagstone floor. He didn’t have to move closer to know what it was. The fat man lying on his side looked to be a minimum of three hundred pounds of dead weight. Blood sluggishly oozed from the gaping gash in his throat.
The tall, lean man lying on his back, sightless eyes gazing up at the rafters, lay in a pool of blood, too, just not so much of it. His leather jacket hung open, revealing three bloody holes grouped neatly over the shirtfront.
Guana Teague’s near decapitation wasn’t a standard Mag method, but Kane recognized the size of the bullet holes in Uno’s torso, as well as the precision with which they’d been placed.
He decided to take a chance. He activated his comm link and whispered, “Grant?”
Grant’s voice, full of strain, replied, “Behind you.”
The stereophonic reply came from two directions. One, transmitted over his comm link directly into his ear, and the other, as Grant had said, from directly behind. He turned. In the centre of the warehouse, before a high pyramid of stacked cartons and crates, in a semi-circle, stood eight Magistrates. Six of them were in full armour, their bodies as rigid as stone. The two Mags not in armour were Salvo and Grant, but they aimed their Sin Eaters directly at him.
“Leather it, Kane. And come here.” Salvo’s tone sounded as cold and hard as the metal of the blaster in his fist.
Kane’s visored eyes sought out Grant’s. The tall man’s dark face was drawn, his lips tight. “Do as he says, Kane. I know the whole story now.”
The world tilted around him, his belly performing a flip-flop. “Why should I?” Kane felt a distant surprise by how steady his voice sounded.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” Salvo replied. “We’re here to help you.”
Kane slowly approached them, the Sin Eater still in hand. Scanning the jawlines of the Mags, he saw none that were familiar. He felt as if he were breasting waves of despair, of anguish and shame. “Yeah...by killing me.”
“No,” said Salvo quietly. “We still want you, Kane. You just had an extreme reaction to what you’ve been through the last couple of days. It happens to the best of us.”
Kane laughed bitterly. “Do ‘the best of us’ help a convicted traitor escape her executioners?”
“You’ll have to turn Baptiste over to us. She must die and you must accept it.”
Kane kept walking. “And Grant?”
Salvo smiled. “He wants to help you.”
“How are you supposed to help me, Grant?” Kane asked.
Hesitantly Grant said, “You’re delusional, Kane. Some sort of stress syndrome. It can happen, like Anson. Remember him?”
Kane remembered. About six years before, a Mag had fused out after one too many Pit sweeps had resulted in the deaths of pregnant women. He had become a jolt-walker, and then disappeared, presumably into the Terra Infernus.
“I’m not fused,” he declared calmly. “I’m not a jolt-brain, I’m not delusional. Salvo is. He thinks he’s saving the world from itself, and to do that, he schemes, lies, double-crosses and kills anybody who gets in the way of his grand dreams. Including all of us.”
Kane slowed to a stop and stood motionless, legs braced and wide apart. He was about twenty feet away from the Mag line. “Did you talk to Guana or Uno?”
Grant shook his head. “No. They attacked me before I could question them.”
“You cut Guana’s throat?” He saw the blood drying on Grant’s coat, even though attempts had been made to sponge it away.
“Uno did. I came in on the middle of a fight between them. He snuffed Guana, and I was forced to put him down.”
“Leather your side arm, Kane,” Salvo growled.
“Leather your dick,” Kane snapped. “And your fucking Archons.”
Salvo’s lips went white and the barrel of the Sin Eater jerked a trifle in reaction to his words. “Kane—”
“Kill me, Salvo. Like you did Reeth. Before I start talking about Archons, the Trust, tele-trans portals, about helping you to build a new world order of masters and slaves.”
Grant suddenly stepped away from the line, his Sin Eater raised. “Kane, put away the blaster. Salvo told me you wouldn’t be harmed, and I believe him. If he meant to hurt us, if he had planned the hit yesterday, I’d be dead by now. Right?”
He walked closer, voice low and beseeching. “He explained all of it to me, how that Preservationist bitch gave you a load of shit about what was on that disk you lifted, fed you a line about aliens.”
Pain slithered through Kane as he watched Grant’s approach. “Stop. No closer.”
“You won’t shoot me, Kane.”
Kane raised his blaster, centring the bore on the middle of Grant’s forehead. “The hell I won’t. They’ve stolen your mind. Your will. I should have known the division conditioning was too deep. A superior officer tells you to spill a friend’s blood and you say, ’How many gallons and in what colour would you like it, sir?’”
“You’ve got it all wrong. Salvo talked and I listened. That’s all.”
“That’s right,” spoke up Salvo. “There’s no place for you to go. Tell me where you’ve stashed Baptiste, she’ll be taken into custody and I promise you that meaning will be restored to your
life.”
Grant stopped walking. Barely four feet separated him from Kane. Matter-of-factly, he said, “You’ve got to make a decision, Kane. Now.”
Synchronized with his “Now,” Grant pivoted on his heel in a whiplash explosion of perfect coordination of muscle and reflexes. As he whirled, he brought his right hand up and under his left arm. Even before he had completed his turn, the Sin Eater blazed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
AUTOFIRE RAKED THE semicircle of Magistrates in a whipsawing wave. Grant hit the centre Magistrate broadside, bowling him off his feet.
The Sin Eater in Kane’s hand spit flame. One of the Mags stumbled and fell, and all of them voiced a garbled babble of screams and profanity.
The bullets didn’t breach the men’s armour, but the kinetic shock was sufficient to numb them, maybe slam the air out of their lungs. And hurt like hell, too.
Return fire ripped the air around Grant, tearing through it like a ground-level hail-storm. A bullet snapped past his ear, sounding like the crack of a huge branch. He dived to his left.
Kane held down the trigger of his autoblaster, swinging the flame-belching barrel from left to right. Hot brass spewed from the ejector. He found himself subconsciously aiming for the red badges emblazoned on the left pectorals of the body armour. He glimpsed Grant on his knees a few yards away, a little to the rear of him, squeezing off shots at the Mags still on their feet.
Wild rounds smashed into boxes and crates, filling the air with scraps of floating paper and wood particles. Flagstones shattered, the shards whining and buzzing in all directions. Bullets punched holes through the tin warehouse walls.
Salvo stitched Kane across the midriff with a zipper of slugs. The bullets bruised him, beat him coughing to the floor. He rolled, came to his knees, his Sin Eater blowing a cavity in the floor at Salvo’s feet. The exploding, sharp-edged bits of rock slashed his trouser legs, and he tangoed back, trying to shake the pain out of his legs, like a cat with wet paws.
Conditioning was a wondrous thing. Despite the heavy volume of fire erupting from all the blasters, the men were instinctively aiming to disable, not kill. Mags chilling Mags, even Mags gone bad, was blasphemous, inconceivable.
Salvo hopped crazily around the base of the box pyramid, slapping at his stinging legs, screaming in maddened fury. “Kill them, you stupid bastards! Kill them!”
As if to punctuate his shrieked command, he drew a double-handed bead on Grant and held down the trigger. Grant backpedalled and plunged to the floor as a stream of 9mm tumblers smashed up the flagstones around him, showering him with rock chips.
He threw himself forward in a frantic somersault, trying to roll ahead of the deadly lead stream. His body suddenly spun around like a top, flipping him over on his face. As he twirled, he screamed some gibberish, which sounded like “Domi! Do it!”
Kane stopped dodging and dancing and rushed headlong toward Salvo and the three Mags still on their feet. He stretched out his right arm ahead of him, flame blooming and sharp thunder cracking from his Sin Eater. One of the Mags fired at him, and he felt a pair of glancing impacts on the top of his left shoulder. He staggered, his aim spoiled. His shots missed Salvo by a whisper but ripped through the Mag standing next to him, turning his cheekbones, nose and mouth into a red jelly smear.
At the same instant the Mag corkscrewed sideways against the base of the box pyramid, an engine roar echoed throughout the warehouse. It was immediately followed by a metal-on-metal grinding and clashing of gears.
The pyramid of boxes swayed, the lower tiers stretching and then bursting apart. Salvo tried to run, but the pinnacle and its supporting containers toppled, burying him beneath a crashing avalanche of boxes, crates and pallets.
Kane vaulted to one side, cartwheeling his way out of the careening path of the wag. Its treads rolled over and crushed one of the fallen Mags, his armour cracking and splitting open like the carapace of a beetle.
The two Mags still on their feet backed away from the charging vehicle in a clumsy, shambling run. They fired at it, the rounds clanging and striking sparks from the armour plate.
The cross-braced steel barricade remover slammed into them, flinging them, arms and legs flailing, across the warehouse. One struck the wall, leaving an imprint of his head in the tin. The other crashed through the side of a large, wood-panelled packing crate.
With a screech of rusty brake shoes catching, the vehicle shuddered noisily to a halt. Foul smoke belched from the exhaust stacks. Even on idle, the engine roared like an enraged beast. Kane didn’t know where to look or to aim. Peripheral images crowded his vision. In front of him was the armoured Sandcat. On his right, Grant struggled to get to his knees. His face was drenched in perspiration, he grunted in pain, but his teeth flashed in a savage grin. To the left, a dazed Mag dragged himself along the floor.
The driver’s door of the vehicle squealed open, and he glimpsed a small white wraith at the wheel. She waved to Grant and shouted, “Come on!”
The firefight ended as suddenly as it began, and Kane was in instant motion, at Grant’s side and pulling him to his feet. He hissed through clenched teeth and grabbed at his right thigh. Blood seeped between his fingers.
Kane pushed the coat aside, examining the wound, touching both sides of the thigh. “The slug went clean through, tearing only the layers of skin. It’s the proverbial flesh wound. The muscles are probably bruised, though. You’re lucky.”
Grant’s leg wobbled, but it supported him. Voice tight with suppressed pain, he said, “Let me shoot you in the leg and you can tell me how lucky you feel.”
“Since you’re bitching already, I guess you’ll make a full recovery. Wish we had a medikit, though.”
“There’s one in the Sandcat. Whatever else you can say about Guana, the fat bastard was always prepared. Except for when Domi cut his throat.”
Kane nodded toward the girl in the Sandcat. “Domi. Isn’t she the same outrunner bitch who nearly got you killed you?”
“Yeah, but so did you, so I’m not holding any grudges.” Grant released his pent-up breath in a gusty sigh, his eyes surveying the carnage. “We’ve overstayed.”
Kane turned and began walking toward the door.
Grant called after him. “I had you going, didn’t I?”
Kane paused, a smart-ass remark on his lips. He bit it back and said simply, “Yeah.”
Grant showed his teeth in rare grin. “Bet you feel like the most triple-dipped asshole in the world right now.”
Kane shook his head. “No. I feel like the most triple-dipped lucky asshole in the world.”
He found Brigid where he had stowed her. She had armed herself with a splinter pried from a wooden pallet, holding it like a dagger, one end of it wrapped with a length of fabric ripped from the sleeve of her bodysuit.
Anxiously she asked, “Is it over?”
“It’s just beginning,” he replied grimly, helping her to her feet.
She followed him back to the centre of the warehouse. She averted her eyes, and Kane didn’t blame her. The scene was not for the sensitive. Grant stood beside the open door of the Sandcat, his right leg propped up on the running board. The albino girl, Domi, expertly knotted a tourniquet made of a Mag’s belt around his thigh.
“Something tells me you developed a plan,” Kane said.
“Of sorts. I’ll fill you in on the hoof. Climb aboard.”
Kane sent Brigid on ahead. He pushed through the scattering of fallen boxes, kicking them aside. Most of them were empty, but several of the wooden crates were sturdy, and therefore quite heavy. He found Salvo beneath one.
His right arm was trapped beneath the crate, but he held the pin mike clumsily between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Kane reached down, snatched it away and tore it loose from his coat’s lapel. Salvo’s normally sallow complexion was ashen. Blood glistened from a shallow
gash on the crown of his head, and he appeared to breathe with difficulty.
He had enough breath to bare blood-filmed teeth and gasp out, “Should have known. Like father, like son.”
“What do you mean?” Kane snarled. “Where’s my father?”
The injured man shook his head, attempting to curl his lips in a sneer. Kane leaned his weight against the side of the crate. Salvo cried out, and a fine spray of bright crimson froth burst from his mouth.
“A punctured lung, looks like,” Kane said. “Survivable, if I allow it. How much of this Archon shit is true?”
Salvo’s reply was an aspirated wheeze. “All of it. None of it. Only as much as you can authenticate. Which is very little.”
“Where’s my father?”
“Like the baron said—still performing the work of the Trust.”
Kane leaned on the crate again. “I asked where!”
“You know already. You just don’t know that you know.”
“Kane!” Grant’s shout was galvanizing. “Let’s go!”
Salvo’s glazed eyes fluttered. “You think you and Grant are the first Mags to cut and run? You’re not. You probably won’t be the last, either. Once you ran, you’ve got to keep running. That’s the life of an outrunner.”
“You’re wrong,” Kane said quietly. He aimed the Sin Eater at an invisible point on Salvo’s broad forehead. “I’m done with running. And you’re done with everything.”
“Shoot me and be damned.”
The muzzle of the Sin Eater didn’t move and didn’t spout fire or noise.
Salvo eyed it. In a gravelly whisper, he said, “Don’t tell me pity stays your hand.”
“Yeah,” said Kane, mocking the whisper. “It’s pity, all right. It’s a pity I’ve run out of bullets.”
He heaved the packing crate aside. “On your feet.”
Salvo clumsily flopped over on his left side, his right hand folded loosely around the butt of his Sin Eater. “I think my arm is broken.”
“I’m not asking you to walk on your hands. On your feet—slagger.”