by James Axler
Pushing the front door closed silently behind him, Kane entered the apartment, the Sin Eater still poised in his hands. As he reached the end of the short corridor, Kane brushed one hand close to the wall, triggering the motion sensor that fed the overhead lights. The lights snapped on, dimming for a moment as they found a comfortable lighting level to complement the rain filtered gloom.
The apartment was empty; Kane was sure of that now. It smelled of dust and unwashed clothes and of something else—grease and oil, like a mechanic’s bench.
Kane looked around. Though it was empty, the apartment was not without interest to a Magistrate. Few were. The main living space had been converted into what appeared to be a workshop, reminding Kane a little of the Magistrate garage where the mechanics worked on the Sandcat vehicles they used outside the ville’s walls. There were hunks of greased metal lining the floor, what looked like an industrial turbine resting on the deflated couch, and pots and jars of screws, each carefully sorted by diameter and length.
Kane checked the other rooms of the apartment: two bedrooms, a basic bathroom, an open-plan kitchen. It was untidy, with worn clothes and dirty towels strewed on both bedroom floors, but otherwise there was nothing especially notable about the residence. He’d unearthed evidence of the smart drugs that would be found in Helena Vaughn’s body when the coroner completed her analysis later that week. The components were scattered across a desk in the smaller bedroom—standard viral radiation blockers and some plant extracts. In fairness to the Pellerito kid, Vaughn’s reaction had been extreme; it was a one-in-a-thousand freak happenstance.
Kane returned to the living room, sending his Sin Eater back to its hidden holster with a well-practiced flick of his wrist tendons. He looked around at the pots and jars, the greasy metal slabs that lay on the couch and floor.
Intrigued, the Magistrate reached down, turning over several of the metal parts—machined cogs and gears, something that looked like it could be armor plate. There was paperwork here, too, smeared with oil-stained fingerprints, a line of penciled workings neatly written down one side, adding personal notes to the printed-out design. Removing his helmet, Kane read the words that were typed in bold there: Signal block.
The term was followed by a series of numbers and reference codes and accompanied a cutaway diagram of what appeared to be an octagonal drum or box. It meant nothing to Kane. The only part of it he recognized was what appeared to be a radio transmission unit attached across the upper section of the octagon.
Kane glared at the strange design for a moment. The paper was new but the plan that had been printed on it could be ancient. There was no way to really tell.
Kane looked up as he heard a sound coming from the front door at the far end of the apartment. As he watched, the door pushed open and a scruffy-looking teenager strolled in, hair an unruly dark tangle, a carpet of acne bubbling red and white across his chin, forehead and both cheeks. The lad had a sneering smile, the smile of one raised in privilege who thus valued nothing.
The Sin Eater was back in Kane’s hand before the kid even realized he was there.
“Freeze,” Kane instructed.
The kid froze, not even knowing what he was doing. Fear of the Magistrates had become ingrained in the populace, their dark uniforms designed to instil terror.
Kane gestured with the Sin Eater. “Get on your knees, Pellerito,” he ordered. “Down on your knees.”
Wild-eyed, the kid did exactly as Kane told him, his hands raised up at shoulder height. “Who are—?” he sputtered, struggling on the words.
“Magistrate Kane,” Kane told him. “And you’re Jerod Pellerito, right?”
The kid nodded, watching as Kane retrieved his Magistrate helmet and placed it over his head with single-handed precision.
“Girl by the name of Helena Vaughn is dead. Know her?”
Pellerito nodded again.
“Then you’re in a lot of trouble,” Kane told him.
Jerod Pellerito laced his hands behind his head and Kane cuffed him amid the mechanical debris that littered the apartment.
Chapter 4
It was a given that Jerod Pellerito had always been interested in technology. It should perhaps not have come as a surprise to Kane to find him the spider at the center of this factory web.
Standing two paces inside the room above the factory floor, Kane held his hands loosely at his sides and offered his most sincere shit-eating grin. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Don’t remember me? Jerod Pellerito?” Pellerito scoffed. “Don’t you Magistrates remember everyone you screw?”
“Ex-Magistrate,” Kane corrected smoothly. “Lot of water under the bridge since then, Mr. Pellerito.”
As he spoke, Kane surreptitiously surveyed the rest of the room. Although the large table that dominated the room held fourteen seats, there was only one other individual there besides Pellerito himself: a bald man in a neatly tailored suit wearing dark glasses that completely obscured his eyes. The bald man had a pale complexion and a facial expression that gave so little away that he seemed almost drained of any personality. His suit was tight, clinging to his narrow-shouldered frame in an unflattering way that made him seem almost rodentlike in proportion, its high collar tightly cinched about his throat. The bald man had a large book before him, open at a handwritten page.
Pellerito eyed Kane warily for a moment, his acne-scarred face distorting as he tried to second-guess the man standing before him. Then his eyes flicked across to Kane’s companions and his calm facade seemed to return, in control once more. “Well, you’re not hanging around with Magistrates, anyway,” he decided. “These two know what you used to do for a living?”
Brigid voiced her assent, while Grant just nodded, putting a hand up self-consciously as if to adjust his glasses.
“You left Cobaltville when it started to crumble, I take it?” Pellerito suggested.
“Little before that,” Kane corrected. “Difference of opinion with some of my other Mags. Seemed they didn’t like the laws I was enforcing.”
Pellerito nodded. “Probably for the best,” he lamented. “Cobaltville’s like the rest of them now. Pesthole with benefits.” He shrugged. “So, Robert here tells me you’re in the investment game these days. That right?”
Kane nodded, and Pellerito offered him a place to sit opposite him across the vast boardroom table. He introduced the bald man at its far end as his accountant. “A necessary evil, I’m afraid.”
Kane took his seat while Brigid and Grant took up positions to either side of him. As they did so, Pellerito swiveled back to a small octagonal unit that rested on a window ledge behind him. Made of unmarked plastic, the unit was no bigger than a hardcover book. Despite its blank appearance, Kane saw three diode strips running across the side, and he watched these come to life as Pellerito flipped a button at the top of the box. For a moment, Kane felt a strange vibration inside his ear, and he realized that the hidden Commtact there had been triggered.
Surgically embedded beneath the skin of the Cerberus field personnel, the Commtact was a radio communications unit that defied conventional detection. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound. In theory, even a deaf user would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.
Kane twitched momentarily as he felt the Commtact snap. Something was playing up and down its frequencies, dispersing any signal it might broadcast or receive. Grant and Bri
gid felt the same effect as Kane, and were careful to give no outward indication as the radio spectrum buzzed through their ear canals. After a moment, the disorienting effect passed.
“Little something for our protection,” Pellerito explained as he took his seat. “Ensure no one’s listening in.”
Before him, Jerod Pellerito had spread a sheaf of paperwork, which included spreadsheets, tables of figures and a series of three-dimensional construction drawings. Brigid’s emerald eyes glanced across the paperwork for less than a second as she adjusted her position to sit, and with a slow blink she digested the information that she had taken in. As she did so, Pellerito continued to speak, running his hand across the papers to tidy them into a neat pile. It was a nervous gesture, contradicting his facade of confidence.
Then Pellerito picked up a metal nail file that lay beside his notes, working its roughened length over his fingernails as he spoke. “We’re producing some stuff here that your old Magistrate buddies wouldn’t appreciate very much,” he explained.
“So we saw,” Kane acknowledged.
“But it’s a big operation, and there’s a huge market for this stuff out there now,” the pockmarked trader went on, his eyes still fixed on the fingernail he was filing down. “Seems everyone’s arming themselves up the wazoo just now. Between the fall of the baronies and all that religious crusade stuff that floated around, who can blame folks for being scared?”
“It can be brutal out there,” Kane agreed, and Pellerito laughed.
“Yeah, it’s scary once you’re outside of ville walls, ain’t it?”
“Touché,” Kane replied.
As the two men sparred verbally, Brigid Baptiste stared blankly at Pellerito, apparently offering him the politest minimum of attention. In her mind’s eye, however, she was mentally reviewing what she had seen on his desk. The tables of figures gave an idea of the scale of the operation. More interesting, however, were the line drawings she had seen. These showed the inner workings for two different types of antiaircraft missile launchers, with blowback projections and comparisons.
There had been a third sheet, Brigid saw in her mind, obscured by the others. It looked like a construction diagram for some sort of road vehicle, but all she had made out were the tire treads and suspension information for the back wheels before Pellerito had covered it. That information suggested the vehicle was designed to take a lot of weight—something big, then.
“So, what are we looking at?” Kane probed, glancing across to the bald accountant. “You need investment for what exactly?”
Pellerito fixed him with his pale eyes. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
With that, Pellerito pocketed the nail file and got to his feet. Buchs and the two sec men waiting by the door stiffened. Taking his cue, Kane pushed himself away from the table and stood as Pellerito ambled toward the door, and Grant and Brigid joined him a moment later. Remaining seated, the accountant in the corner didn’t even bother to look up from his busy paperwork.
* * *
THERE WAS NOTHING INSIDE the Cerberus mat-trans chamber now, just the same six walls, tiled ceiling and floor that Domi had seen a hundred times before. Behind the riblike struts of the ventilation ducts, fans whirred, filtering the rank-smelling air from the room. It still retained the faint odor of rotting meat.
“Smells bad, but there’s nothing else here,” Sela Sinclair confirmed as she followed Domi, the 9 mm Smith & Wesson in her hand. The metallic lines of the handblaster glinted beneath the harsh lights as Sinclair trained it across the room, turning in a smooth arc to check the familiar staging area that she had used dozens of times before.
Outside, Edwards was kneeling down at the oily pool of gunk that had moments ago been a woman. The pool was spreading across the floor at his feet, shimmering lines of red, gold, green and blue webbing across its oily surface, reflected from the Mercator map. “Let’s get this...leak...contained,” Edwards growled, shuffling back as the puddle oozed gradually closer.
Behind Edwards, the ops room remained in a shocked silence, almost two-dozen personnel still trying to process what they had just seen. A woman had died here, disintegrating before their eyes.
Standing by his desk, Lakesh cleared his throat, drawing everyone’s attention. “Okay, people,” he said. “We’ll get a cleanup crew in here and have Reba do an analysis of whatever is left of that woman. Mr. Farrell, I also want a full analysis of the mat-trans algorithms before and during the rogue delivery.”
Farrell assented and turned back to his terminal, pulling up the relevant data for analysis.
“Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh continued, “run through the current functionality. Full system check.”
Hunched at another of the terminals, Brewster Philboyd, a lanky figure with dark-framed glasses, receding blond hair and pockmarked cheeks, nodded his acknowledgment of the request, his fingers already playing across his computer keyboard.
“Donald?” Lakesh continued.
From close by, Donald Bry—Lakesh’s right-hand man—came marching over with a half-full cup of coffee in his hand. He wore a fretful expression beneath unruly copper curls of hair, and his brow was creased with concern. Coffee stained the front of his tunic, evidence that the sudden appearance of the mat-trans traveler had surprised him. “Yes, Lakesh.”
“Organize a team to do a complete check of the mat-trans network. Find out if this has been happening elsewhere,” Lakesh instructed. “We may just be one of numerous mat-trans facilities that have witnessed this phenomenon.”
A computer expert by training, Bry inclined his head in agreement before scurrying off to select his research team.
“As for the rest of you,” Lakesh said, raising his voice to be heard. “Get back to work. We have a field team out there right now, and they need our support.”
Beth Delaney, the blonde comms op, called to Lakesh from the communications hub. She wore a commset hooked over one ear, its pickup microphone jutting out on a thin wire just beyond the extent of her jaw. The flesh around her jaw was puffy where a wound was still healing. Her jaw had been broken a couple of months ago during a brutal invasion of the Cerberus redoubt. “Shouldn’t we warn CAT Alpha?” she asked. “They intend to return via mat-trans at some point today.”
Lakesh considered this for a moment. Kane’s team—CAT Alpha—had accessed the mat-trans to reach their current destination, where they were investigating a conspiracy to supply arms. “For now we must maintain radio silence,” Lakesh decided. “To tip their hand too soon, to alert their foes to our presence, could prove even more dangerous for them than whatever has happened here.”
Beth nodded, returning to her monitoring of the communications network.
* * *
KANE KEPT PACE AS Jerod Pellerito led the way, walking beside him as they made their way along the metal walkway that arched over the factory floor. Brigid and Grant followed, surreptitiously observing everything that was proceeding in the factory while Robert Buchs kept a rear guard with two of the security officers, bounding along on his scythelike leg extensions, the guards exuding bored efficiency.
“Makes sense you getting into the weapons game,” Pellerito opined as they strolled along the catwalk. “Ex-Magistrate like you knows his firepower.”
Kane gave a cruel smile. “Formally trained,” he said. “Had to put it to some use when I got out of the system.”
“So how did that come about, again?” Pellerito asked. “You were a pretty fearsome bastard when I met you.”
“Just a disagreement,” Kane said dismissively. “Personal stuff.”
In less than a minute, Pellerito had led the group the full length of the catwalk to the far side of the factory. From up here they could see the conveyor belts churning, transporting glinting shafts of metal along their trundling lengths, the familiar burn of acetylene torches illuminating the factory floor
in lightning splashes, grinding wheels spinning and howling as workers smoothed the rough edges off their wares. Beyond the buzz of workers, one area had been effectively fenced off by curtain-draped scaffolding. Beyond it, a single large operation was in progress with several whitecoats moving back and forth to examine specific parts of the construction.
“See that?” Pellerito said, gesturing to the enclosed area.
Kane placed his hands on the catwalk’s safety rail and peered over the edge. Below him, over the lip of the curtained-off area, he saw a massive tubelike structure in the process of construction. A metallic cylinder with a two foot diameter was being put together piece by piece, sections of it waiting to be attached, workmen running metal files over its surface to smooth the edges where they would join. Because it was still in pieces, it was impossible to judge how long the cylinder would ultimately be, but it looked huge.
Kane’s gaze worked over the parts for a half minute, recognizing the flaring tail fins and the nose cone with its bed of circuitry. The ex-Mag’s stomach clenched as he realized what Pellerito’s men were constructing.
“What is that?” Kane asked, to confirm his worst fears. “A missile?”
Smiling wickedly, Pellerito nodded. “Guided missile,” he explained. “Nuclear payload, the works. I have several buyers lined up who’ll pay a lot for one of these.”
“What are they hoping to do?” Grant asked, peering over the edge of the walkway. “Start a war?”
Turning to him, Pellerito shrugged. “I’m just supplying the goods, not playing Magistrate. The baronies are in disarray, villes are starting to make their own laws now. Guess you never know when you’ll need more firepower than your friendly—or not-so-friendly—neighbor.”
Turning back from the platform edge, Brigid addressed Pellerito. “You said this thing was nuclear?”
“Nuclear capability, yes,” Pellerito clarified.
“And you have the load material?” Brigid asked insistently.
Pellerito offered a broad smile. “What is this, the third degree?” He was becoming suspicious, Kane could see, uncomfortable with the direction Brigid’s questions were leading.