Callsign Cerberus

by Mark Ellis

  “‘We’?” Kane echoed mockingly. “Don’t put yourself on the same footing as humans.”

  “I stand corrected. I occupy a much higher position. Yes, I am a hybrid of human and Archon, and I am ashamed of the human element within me. I take a bit of solace in the fact that at least my human genes spring from the very best, carefully selected stock.”

  Kane didn’t respond. In anticipation of the baron’s next words, his limbs began to tremble. Baron Cobalt noticed, because his smile widened.

  “You face an interesting problem. Some of that superior genetic human material derives from your grandfather. If you kill me, you’ll be committing fratricide, after a fashion. A sin that, I recall from old religious teachings, immediately consigned souls to eternal damnation. Do you want to be damned?”

  Kane gritted his teeth, battling the soul-destroying sickness threatening to overwhelm him.

  “Why are you here, Kane?”

  “To find the truth about you, about humanity. I had to find out if you and your kind actually existed or if you were some strain of mutant.”

  “I am human, Kane. The new human.”

  Kane studied Baron Cobalt’s perfectly sculpted face, the golden eyes bright with intelligence, the too smooth skin, the high forehead, the small ears set too low on the head.

  “No,” he said. “You’re outside of humanity.”

  “The humanity you know is dead. The new humanity is taking its place. All a matter of natural selection. Nature taking its course.”

  “Nature didn’t create you.”

  “Sometimes nature must be prodded. Believe me, Kane,” Baron Cobalt continued, his musical voice sounding notes of kindness, of compassion, “I sympathize with your shock, your disorientation. You would have been indoctrinated eventually into these secrets. Not even Salvo has been to this part of the installation. Return with me to the barony, and you will take his place in the Trust. You will occupy an exalted position. You will not be serving me or the Archon Directorate, but the new humanity. We are a highly evolved breed, and our numbers are growing. We find rewards in life that our forebears were incapable of appreciating. This is our world now, and nothing can be done to arrest the tide. Stop opposing us. It will do you no good. Accept our kind as we have accepted your kind.”

  A strange heat made Kane’s voice thick, his tongue feeling clumsy. “My father and all those others did not volunteer to serve or to help create a new humanity. You enslaved them, stole their lives and their identities. No matter how highly evolved you claim your breed is, you still need lowly humans to survive. You need lousy humans like Reeth to supply you with fresh meat. So, explain to me, Lord Baron, how does all that scheming and stealing and double-crossing make you superior to us apelings? You’re no different than the lowliest Pit boss in the worst slaghole of Tartarus.”

  Baron Cobalt’s hands came up, his long fingers clutching at Kane’s wrist, trying to tear his hand away from his throat. In a rage, he barked, “You’ll die, I’ll have you dismembered while you’re still alive—”

  Kane chuckled. “Look at you. You’re puny, your body is fragile. You have to be sustained by artificial means. You and the Archons are so terrified of us, you trick us into living down to our basest impulses, then condition us to be ashamed of the very positions you forced us into. No, you’re not superior. What you are is a race of jealous, dickless parasites.”

  The fury in the golden eyes burned hot and molten. The baron struggled wildly, kicking at Kane’s legs, long fingers flailing at his face. He fought like a trapped animal, crushing his knuckles on Kane’s armoured chest, mashing toes into his shin guards. Kane held him easily and laughed.

  “I rest my case, Lord Baron. You can’t beat us. You may have won a battle, may have won a lot of battles throughout history, but humanity always manages to get back up one more time after the Archons have knocked us down. No matter how blasphemous it sounds to you, we’ll get up again and we’ll kick your genetically superior asses out of our lives, our futures, once and for all.”

  To emphasize his words, Kane slowly squeezed the baron’s throat. Baron Cobalt’s face grew dark with congested blood. His pale tongue protruded past his thin lips. Kane maintained the pressure until the baron’s slim frame shuddered and sagged.

  Kane opened his hand, and the baron dropped limply to the floor, on his right side, splashing into the standing puddle of chemicals. Kane gazed down at him, not sure if he’d choked the life out of him or not, and at the moment, not giving much of a damn.

  “New humanity,” Kane muttered, looking down at the soiled, scrawny figure at his feet. He spoke into the helmet comm link. “Grant?”

  “Right here.”

  “You heard?”

  “Your side of it.” His voice was strained.

  “Where are you?”

  “Where you left us.”

  “Stay there. I’m—”

  A pulse of sound drove into Kane’s head, penetrating his helmet and eardrums like a white-hot nail. He reeled in a sudden blaze of pain, his scuffling feet unsteady and seeking purchase in the puddle around him. A bass humming, almost physical, tightened around his brain like a steel vice.

  He managed to keep from falling, shambling around in a half turn to see a quartet of hybrids approaching. The male occupying a centre position wore a grey bodysuit of metallic weave and held a slender silver wand in his right hand. Three feet long, the wand hummed and shivered, its gleaming length somehow blurred.

  The man with the wand said calmly, “I’ve seen him before, in the Cliff Palace.”

  The hybrid beside him said, “Subdue him or kill him.”

  Kane raised his pistol. The tip of the wand dipped toward him. Shrieking violence filled his head, and he collapsed, hammered to the floor by the storm of pain.

  He caught himself on his elbows, steadying the Sin Eater in a double-handed grip. His first target was the man with the wand. He worked the trigger.

  The gleaming rod swept out, fanning in a hazy semicircle. It hummed, popped and Kane heard the sharp clang of impact, then the whine of a ricochet. The slender man stood unharmed and smiling a gentle, patronizing smile.

  Kane fired again, a 3-round burst, aiming for the middle of the high, unlined forehead. Again, the wand inscribed a humming arc, its tip dancing from left to right. Three pops! concussed the air, and bullets buzzed and screamed in all directions, crashing against and bouncing away from metal.

  Somehow the rod produced an invisible field that deflected the bullets, yet at the same time directed energies that made his head feel as if it were about to burst. Kane couldn’t understand the dynamic at work, and he doubted his questions would be answered if he asked them. He shifted the barrel of the Sin Eater a fraction to the right and squeezed the trigger.

  The little hybrid standing beside the man with the wand catapulted backward, his torso squirting out blood like a squeezed sponge. The creatures on either side of him yelped in terror and reacted by trying to run blindly away, without even attempting to watch where they were going. Kane fired again, the Sin Eater’s roar painfully loud.

  The heavy-calibre round took another hybrid in the head and spun him around in a grotesque pirouette. Banners of blood streamed from the wound, draping his companions and the walls with red liquid ribbons. The man holding the wand stumbled aside, his face crimson bedaubed, trying to clear his vision with frantic swipes from his left hand.

  Kane gathered his legs beneath him, sprang to his feet and began a dizzy, shambling run. He tasted blood sliding warmly over his lips, streaming from ruptured capillaries in his nose. He had no idea what kind of weapon the hybrid employed, but he was fairly certain his helmet had saved him from exploded eardrums or worse.

  The floor pitched and yawed beneath him, and he had trouble running in a straight line. He fixed his gaze on the top of the filtration tank as a landmark and he raced toward
it. Pale figures flitted near him, on either side in the red-tinged gloom, lithe and swift, seeking to draw ahead and cut off his escape.

  He reached the base of the tank and was running around it when he heard Brigid yell, followed by the door-slamming bang of her handblaster. A fraction of a second later came the stutter of Grant’s Sin Eater. Piping voices, squealing in rage and fear, fluted all around.

  He saw Brigid coming toward him, holding her H&K in a double grip, backed by Grant sweeping the perimeter with his Sin Eater. A faint twist of smoke curled from the barrel. Domi brought up the rear, fisting her knife.

  “They’re on to us now,” Kane gasped, wiping blood from his lips with the back of his hand. “They’ve got some kind of weapon. I don’t know what it is, but it’s pretty nasty. They almost got me.”

  “Yeah,” replied Domi looking around warily, “they were trying to outflank you. Guess they thought you were alone, didn’t expect to see us. The little fuckers are sure light on their feet.”

  The air suddenly shivered with a hum, and Kane jerked reflexively. The surface of the tank near his head suddenly acquired a deep dent, accompanied by a whang of sound. Wiry slivers of metal and scraps of paint burst up all around the impact point.

  The four people started to run. Brigid said briskly, “Ultrasonics, I imagine. Infrasound. Electric current converted to sonic waves by a little gadget called a maser. Something the PreNuke military fooled around with as part of their non-lethal weapons experiments.”

  Still battling waves of vertigo, Kane said, “Non-lethal, my ass.”

  Brigid saw how he swayed unsteadily on his feet, how he had to clutch at the pipelines on the wall for support. “You took a hit?”

  “Yeah,” he wheezed. “More than one.”

  “If it’s any consolation, all you probably suffered was a little inner-ear damage. Nothing permanent.”

  The four of them reached the wire-mesh door and plunged into the tiled corridor. Grant stopped to look behind, digging into his war bag. “Keep going!”

  He held the DM5 frag gren in his left hand, pulled away the pin with his teeth and tossed it underhanded. It landed where the wall joined with the floor, directly beneath the pipelines. He turned and sprinted down the corridor, counting backward beneath his breath. When he reached Three, the passage reverberated to a sharp explosion and rattling of steel balls. They punctured the pipes, and clouds of steam mixed with the billowing smoke. Even through his armour, Grant felt the puff of heat.

  He caught up with Kane, Domi and Brigid. “Don’t know if that slowed ’em up any.”

  “No reason to think it didn’t,” Domi said grimly.

  Foul-smelling vapor drifted toward them, and they jogged away from it. When they reached the glass door leading to the alley, they slowed to a trot. Kane didn’t want to walk through it again, unless the circumstances were dire. He was on the verge of suggesting they seek an alternate route when he heard a humming buzz, like an angry insect. Grant cried out and fell forward, back arched, arms outstretched as if he had received a blow between his shoulder blades. As he toppled, Kane saw the fist-sized dent in his armour.

  Simultaneously the door exploded inward in a shower of glass.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  BRIGID’S REACTION WAS the fastest. Finger already on the trigger of the H&K, she swivelled from the hips and fired a whole magazine down the steam- and smoke-filled corridor, the reports coming so fast they sounded like a single, prolonged bam.

  Grant pushed himself to his knees, wagging his head from side to side. Brigid stepped beside him, her eyes probing the mist. “You caught an overspill of the ultrasonics. You’ll be okay.”

  Domi and Kane dragged him to his feet.

  Grant shook his head. “Something’s wrong with my eyes. Everything’s out of focus—”

  “We’re in wonderful shape,” Domi observed dryly, hustling Grant toward the doorway by his right arm.

  “Aren’t we just,” said Kane, taking Grant by the left arm. “The motion impaired leading the blind.”

  Brigid ejected the spent clip from her handblaster, thumbed in a fresh one and said, “Get going. I’ll cover your backsides.”

  Pulling Grant along, Kane and Domi kicked through the shattered ruin of the door and entered the alley. Grant said, “I’m better. Things aren’t as blurry.”

  Releasing him, Kane turned to see Brigid backing through the scattering of broken glass, blaster trained on the corridor. “Don’t see them,” she said. “Maybe the going got too rough.”

  “It’s apt to get rougher,” Kane replied. “They probably have another way topside and they’ll be waiting to cut us off.”

  He glanced at his chron. “We’ve got twenty-one minutes. That’s not enough time for all of us to get back to Level Four.”

  “More than enough,” Domi said grimly, “if you stop making gloomy predictions and get moving.”

  Grant shook his head and declared, “This situation is the classic one-percenter.”

  “We’ll improve the odds as we go,” Kane responded.

  They went back into the nightmare lab area. Kane saw no use in ordering a standard deployment of personnel and firepower. He was still suffering from bouts of vertigo and reeling drunkenly from time to time, Grant’s vision was still foggy and both Brigid and Domi were untrained. They all ran in a blundering rush, Kane occasionally veering from side to side, bumping into Grant, who felt his way along the glass-fronted wall.

  When they approached the section where the bodies lay in cryonic stasis, Kane called a halt. He reached into his war bag and produced a pair of grenades.

  “Incends,” he said, hefting them in either hand. “How many do you have, Grant?”

  He pawed through his pouch and pulled out a metal egg. “One.”

  “What do you want those for?” Brigid asked anxiously.

  “I want to blow this place.”

  “Why? Diversion, revenge or what?”

  “A little of all three. Also, mercy. If those people are still alive, at least we can make sure they won’t be used as biological material for the new humanity.”

  “It might not do any good, Kane. Their stasis canisters might be too well shielded.”

  “It might not do any good, it might not stop their program, but at least we can screw up their timetable a little.”

  “What difference would it make?” asked Domi.

  “A great deal. To me.”

  Using his thumbs, Kane flipped away the firing levers, tossed them behind him and started running. Grant cursed, pulled the lever of his gren, hurled it and ran after him. Brigid and Domi outdistanced them both.

  Behind them, the lab disintegrated in a roaring white flash.

  The glass-fronted cubicles shattered as if giant fists smashed into them. The entire passageway shuddered brutally. Shards of glass rained down on the floor behind them, and the scorching heat of the thermite charges buffeted their bodies.

  Grant’s incendiary detonated, and the rolling balls of flame overlapped, instantly building to a roaring inferno. The thundering shock waves felt like a storm-driven surf.

  A hurricane of super-heated air converged from all sides, slapping their breaths back into their nostrils. An intolerable white glare lit their way, casting their elongated, distorted shadows on the floor ahead of them. Their eyes, adjusted to the red-tinted dimness of the installation, stung and watered. Behind them they heard the screeching rasp of ripping metal and the splintering of glass. The floors and walls shook and trembled, and a cloud of smoke billowed after them, bringing with it a faint scent, like overcooked pork.

  Long before they thought to have reached them, the set of double doors came in sight. The four people slammed them aside, rushed down the aisle between the old medical machines, kicked open the adjoining door and stumbled to the foot of the stairs, tripping the photoelectric sen
sor in the process. Overhead, the concrete slab pivoted up on its side, and they scrambled through it before it was fully ajar.

  They sprinted across the bare floor and empty spaces toward the metal staircase. Kane, his eyes recovering from the glare, was aware of pale shapes flashing swiftly out of the shadows, but he and his companions reached the stairs and hauled themselves up them without being molested.

  When they pounded onto the walkway, they saw why. The catwalk was blocked by a clot of hybrids and Squidoos, over a dozen of them. The tentacle-fingered mutants made mewling sounds which passed for triumphant laughter. Several of the hybrids swished silver wands through the air, like fencers warming up for a duel.

  Domi took a step back, cast a glance over her shoulder and swore. “Fuck it all to hell!”

  Around the base of the stairway glittered dozens of eyes. From the cluster rose the tittering of the Squidoos.

  From the group blocking their forward progress, the hybrid Kane recognized stepped forward, the metal rod rocking back and forth in his hand, like the needle of a metronome. A smile creased his thin mouth.

  He said, “It is our practice to subdue and contain intruders. Killing is sometimes a necessity, but often-times useful tissues are damaged. Will you accept the inevitable?”

  Kane shared a brief look with Grant, Domi and Brigid. They gave quick nods, and he turned to face the hybrid. He slid the Sin Eater back into its holster. Grant followed suit.

  Kane spread his arms wide, hands held at shoulder level. He approached the group slowly. “We accept your terms.”

  An expression bordering on disappointment crossed the hybrid’s smooth, angular face. “A logical choice for an apeling.”

  Kane stopped a few feet away. “What are your orders?”

  The deferential note in his voice inspired the hybrid to take a step forward, an arrogant tilt to his head. “First you will disarm, and then disrobe. You will be—”

  Kane swung his left arm in a vicious sweep. His forearm took the hybrid across the throat with a crunching of bone and cartilage. He flailed backward, over the rail. In falling, he dropped the wand and clutched at one of his comrades, which cost the standing hybrid his balance. He stumbled and fell against those behind him.