by James Axler
“There are no visual recordings, but the mat-trans data log shows a transferral jump sufficient for three bodies,” Brewster explained. “Their transponder signals are logged as reaching the redoubt at that time, and our live satellite imagery shows the chopper they traveled in is still there, close to the redoubt entrance. Short of a time machine to check on them, this is as close as we can get to a categorical confirmation that they used the mat-trans.”
“Short of Kane and his team telling us themselves, of course,” Lakesh pointed out and Philboyd inclined his head, accepting the man’s point.
“Of course,” Philboyd agreed.
“What about this redoubt?” Lakesh asked. “What do we know about it? Could someone else have been there?”
Checking through his notes, Philboyd shook his head. “Security seals were still in place when Kane, Grant and Brigid arrived early this morning,” he said. “Pulling up the data log, the locks had not been tampered with in the past six months. I can take the log back further if we need to, but I’m confident in saying no one was there. Or, if they were, they’ve been drinking their own urine for the past six months.”
“Redoubts were designed to be self-sustaining,” Lakesh reminded him.
“I take your point,” the astrophysicist said, “but the nukecaust is a distant memory. There’s no reason for anyone to still be hiding in this one.”
Lakesh nodded in sage agreement. “So what else do we have?”
“Kane’s team reached their initial destination intact at 11:59,” Philboyd read from his sheet. “Their Commtacts died at 12:03. We can backtrack the data and show that no signal was being broadcast from then. Looks like a jammer of some kind was in operation.”
“Weapons dealers,” Lakesh said witheringly. “Always so wretchedly cautious. So, could the jammed signal be a part of our mystery?”
“Hard to say,” Philboyd said, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “The mat-trans seems to be where the problems really start. Up until then we simply have a communications fail.”
“Fine,” Lakesh accepted. “What else do you have?”
“I did a system-wide check,” Philboyd told his boss, thumbing through several sheets of data to a page showing a graph. “There’s something odd in the mat-trans records. A power spike that runs through everything at 14:07. That’s the exact same time that Kane’s team was preparing to jump.”
“The system was designed to accommodate fluctuations in power,” Lakesh stated.
“Maybe not this one,” Brewster argued. “It looks to be external, but I can’t locate a source.”
“And it affected the mat-trans in the redoubt in Panamint?” Lakesh asked, looking for clarification.
“No, Dr. Singh,” Brewster said. “It touched the whole network. If we trace back through our records here, we can see our own feed spikes for just a few seconds. The same is true of six others I checked at random. It’s line wide.”
Lakesh stroked his chin in thought. “With no source,” he mused.
“I had to go into a quantum analysis to even locate it,” Brewster told him. “This is on the scale of a solar flare or a change in the magnetic fields.”
“Natural...?” Lakesh asked.
Brewster pushed back his hair uncomfortably. “You’re really putting me on the spot with that, Doctor,” he said. “It’s hard for me to confirm or deny. I simply can’t find an obvious source for it.”
Lakesh nodded his appreciation. “So we have a power spike in the mat-trans system at the same exact moment that CAT Alpha team began their jump home,” he concluded. “External source, powerful enough to affect the whole network. And our team disappeared during this spike.”
“It lasted just four seconds,” Philboyd added.
“One obvious conclusion is that the power spike killed them,” Lakesh said. “Though it’s a conclusion I am reluctant to entertain. If the power spike came from a source, then we need to find the source.”
“Data’s all over the place,” Philboyd told him, flipping another page and showing Lakesh the printout there. The printed sheet showed a lined grid within which was a smattering of specks with no discernable pattern. Lakesh pondered it for a moment.
“This looks like a rift,” Lakesh said gravely. “We’re only seeing the peaks of the waves, which gives a false impression of the data. And that means that the source is hidden from us even on a quantum level, like something hidden beneath the surface of the ocean.”
“Assuming these are the peaks or troughs,” Philboyd said, catching on, “we could plot the basic pattern of the waves, which would reveal the source.”
Lakesh nodded. “Or we could sit here discussing it further, Mr. Philboyd,” he prompted with significant irony.
Philboyd nodded. “Understood, Doctor. I’ll get to it right away.” With that, the astrophysicist hurried back to his desk. Lakesh called after him.
“Send the data over to my computer,” Lakesh told him. “I’ll run through it, as well, and we’ll see if we come up with the same result.”
“Yes, sir,” Philboyd acknowledged with a smile.
“And, Brewster?” Lakesh called across the ops room. “Good work. Truly exemplary.”
* * *
“THE BARON WANTED A KNIFE,” Roger Burton said as he sat with Grant in the cold, dark cell. Across the room, a faucet dripped.
The engineer’s eyes were downcast, staring at the scuffed toes of his brown shoes. The shoes were dirty and worn through, and Grant could see the man’s sock through a tear above the left shoe’s heel where the stitching had come free. The discussion was accompanied by the drip-drip of water into the basin, but Grant was finally becoming used to the stench that emanated from the bucket.
“A knife?” Grant asked gently. “What kind of knife?”
Burton looked at him, and Grant could see the terror in the older man’s eyes. “One day, Baron Trevelyan came to my laboratory—that was before he incarcerated me here.” He indicated the room. “He told me about his ‘sight.’ If he looked really intensely, he told me, he could see into other worlds. Worlds like ours, only different.”
“Mars, Venus? Something like that?” Grant asked.
Burton was already shaking his head. “He told me they were the Earth,” he said. “That’s how he explained it to me. He wanted me to design a knife that could reach those other Earths. A way to carve through dimensions.”
Grant realized what the man was talking about. He had some experience of alternate Earths. Balam, a long-time ally of the Cerberus organization, had referred to these other worlds as casements, Earths contained on different dimensional frequencies, each one an altered vision of the one before. They were different realities, each one as complete and viable as the one Grant called home.
It was said that the Annunaki were multidimensional beings, that they could peer into the separate realities and even function in all of them simultaneously. Grant knew that Kane had gained some firsthand experience of that, when he had battled with these pseudo-gods on their own terms. Grant did not presume to fully understand the concept, but what he did understand was that, as a hybrid, Baron Trevelyan had dormant Annunaki DNA twisted into his genetic make-up. The hybrids had been designed to house the genetic outline of the Annunaki for when they were reborn on Earth. As such, the hybrids were nothing short of biological time bombs, containing the DNA sequencing for a superior race of aliens. All of which meant it seemed very credible to Grant that the baron could peer through the quantum veil into other dimensions and hence see other casements, other Earths.
Which led to the obvious question—what Earth had Grant and his companions landed on when they had stepped into that mat-trans unit in the Panamint Mountains? Had they somehow slipped casements? Because, assuming they had, things began to make a whole lot more sense. That would explain the abando
ned ville they arrived in, a ville that none of them had ever heard of. And it also explained the presence of a hybrid baron who had never evolved into an overlord; presumably the final part of the genetic catalyst had never been employed, leaving Trevelyan as one biological time bomb that had never been detonated.
But even as he considered this, another question—one far more pressing—became paramount in Grant’s mind.
“Did Trevelyan tell you why he wanted to reach out to these other Earths?” he asked.
Burton struggled to meet Grant’s gaze. “Why does our baron do anything?” he asked rhetorically. “To own it entire. The way he owns all of us. The way he owns me.”
Grant swallowed hard as the inevitable conclusion began to dawn on him.
* * *
“I KIND OF HOPED WE’D BE able to interrogate him,” Kane growled, staring at the dead body in the cloakroom. “Guess I shouldn’t have left him like this.”
“You weren’t to know,” Brigid told him.
Kane glared at the body of the expired Magistrate. “Damned inconvenient is what this is,” he muttered with a shake of his head.
As she got up to leave, Brigid noticed something bulging from the Mag’s coat pocket that caught the light. It was the arm of a pair of spectacles, poking up where the zipper had come loose in the earlier scuffle. She reached for it, unzipping the Magistrate’s pocket fully and pulling the glasses free. “Kane, look,” Brigid said, holding them up.
“Didn’t look like the kind of guy to wear—” Kane began jovially.
“They weren’t his,” Brigid said. “They’re Grant’s. I’m pretty sure they are, anyway.”
“Where did you find these?” Kane asked, recalling that Grant had been wearing eyeglasses as a part of his disguise while they infiltrated Pellerito’s weapons operation. “Which pocket?”
Brigid showed him. “Here.”
“Zip-up pocket,” Kane said knowingly. “Evidence from a case. Standard Mag protocol. Shit.”
“Why ‘shit’?”
“Means Grant got caught,” Kane said.
“He wasn’t wearing these when he left us,” Brigid reminded him. “Could have dropped them.”
Kane took the glasses, turned them over in his hand for a moment as he thought. To Brigid, her friend looked just the way she felt—exhausted.
“We need to find Grant,” Brigid said, rubbing at her tired eyes with the heel of one hand. “Then find us a way out of here.”
“Yeah,” Kane agreed, peering up from the dead Magistrate as he pocketed the glasses. “How did that go? Anything?”
“The media operation has a communications rig,” Brigid confirmed, stepping out of the cloakroom. “So in theory we could route a message to Cerberus if we had power. But that plan falls down if it turns out we really have jumped to another dimensional plane.”
“How so?” Kane asked, following her out of the room. He pulled the door closed behind him, leaving the decomposing Magistrate in the darkness. “If we can move between these dimensions, then why can’t your signal?”
Walking out into the lobby, Brigid began to answer but she stopped herself. “I...”
“Baptiste?”
“We could send a beacon signal,” Brigid theorized. “By rewiring through a quantum capacitor we could effectively create a quantum radio that transmits its signal via tachyon waves.”
“A quantum capacitor?” Kane queried.
“The internal device that self-maps our interphasers, for example,” Brigid told him. “Whatever called us here would have one—it has to.”
“And where are we going to find that?” Kane wondered. “Back at the hospital?”
“That was the receiver unit, yes,” Brigid confirmed, though she sounded unsure.
“Problem?” Kane prompted.
“No problem,” Brigid said. “That unit had a power source of some sort, too. We’d need to go back there. I’m just figuring out the logistics.”
Kane watched the street beyond the shattered windows of the lobby while Brigid considered the problem. The bansheelike winds continued to churn through the street, but there was no sign of movement now. The patrolling Dark Magistrates were nowhere to be seen, not that that was reassuring.
“We need to split up, use our time more effectively,” Brigid announced. “I’ll return to the hospital and scavenge the parts we need from the mat-trans receiver. The radio could run through that. You go find Grant, then come find me at the hospital. I’ll meet you there.”
“I’m going with you,” Kane said firmly.
Brigid shook her head. “No. Find Grant.”
Before Kane could argue, Brigid plucked up the radio unit from the desk and strode toward the main doors of the reception.
“Okay,” Kane muttered to himself, alone in the lobby. “Find Grant. Sounds easy.”
He paced across the lobby, eyeing the empty street. Brigid was gone already, just her red hair showing occasionally, a shadow among shadows.
“Magistrates,” Kane muttered, pulling Grant’s glasses from his pocket and staring at them. Idly, he worked the arms on their hinges. The glass of one lens had scratched, and the plastic coating of one arm was scuffed. “No, this is good,” he announced. “Magistrate takes the glasses as evidence. Which means he’s taking it somewhere. Mag Hall, that’s the protocol.”
Kane strode over to the ruined glass frontage of the building, looking down the street. “Take the evidence, you also take the prisoner,” he said with a cocky smile. “Yeah, that’s it.”
Swiftly, Kane stepped out of the building and made his way across the courtyard, sticking close to the walls where the shadows were deepest. A moment later he was out on the street, where burned-out automobiles creaked in the wind. He may not know this ville but he knew the ville design—which meant he knew just where the Magistrate Hall of Justice should be. And if he found that, Kane felt sure he would fine Grant, too—alive or dead.
Chapter 23
The sun was beginning its slow descent to the horizon, and Brigid could feel the temperature dropping.
The streets were ghost boulevards stretching through the ville, the only movements created by the raging winds that soared through the streets, licking against the buildings with an anger only Mother Nature herself could conjure. Brigid trudged back toward the hospital where all of this had started, Mossberg shotgun in one hand, radio set in the other.
It was six blocks to the hospital. Even in the dwindling sunlight, the ville was a mess. Whatever had struck had done immeasurable damage. Much of that damage was cosmetic, but it gave the overall effect of an environment that had rotted, like a moldy orange left in the fruit bowl too long.
Brigid sought out the shadows to hide her from the predatory Magistrates who patrolled the city. On the one hand, she yearned to cling to the shadows that sat at the edge of the tall buildings lining the streets. On the other, she was fearful of getting too close in case the punishing winds tore something loose—a hunk of masonry or a windowpane—and flung it into her. Quietly she was also afraid of something else—that someone might be waiting in one of those silent monoliths, that Daryl Morganstern might once more materialize in the shadows, demanding his pound of flesh.
By the time she reached the hospital, the sunlight had diminished to almost nothing, painting the streets a bloody shade of red as the sun set. The hospital was just as she had left it, the wreck of an automobile parked out front, the exterior wall ravaged so its floors were visible through the ruins, open to view like some giant’s doll house.
Brigid needed to get to the third floor, where the mat-trans—or whatever it was—was located. Getting out had been easier, clambering over the ledge and down to the street. To get up again she either needed a fixed line of some sort or she would have to find a staircase.
The reas
on they had climbed down, of course, was because the doors to the room had been sealed. Brigid was confident that if she could get up there, she could find a way in. With that thought, Brigid strode determinedly into the hospital, shotgun and radio clutched in her hands.
She didn’t realize that she was being watched. Two eyes, pale like boiled eggs, peered through the tinted visor of the Magistrate’s helmet where he hid in the burned-out wreck outside the hospital, watching as Brigid picked her way inside, her red-gold hair disappearing into the shadows. His helmet had a terrifying motif—a skeletal demon baby strangling itself with its own tail. Magistrate East had been certain that the rogues would return here, to the place of their incursion, in due course. It was simply a matter of time, and Magistrate East had the infinite patience of a dead man.
Once he was sure that the redhead was inside, East pushed at the driver’s door of the car, shoving it open with a shudder of warped metal. Then he stepped from the vehicle, Soul Eater pistol ready in his hand, and he squawked into the hidden microphone pickup in his helmet. His shrieking voice sounded like radio static as he reported in, the sound muffled by the howling of the winds as he strode toward the holed wall of the building where the woman had just disappeared.
A moment later, East was inside the hospital, blaster ready, searching for the living.
* * *
KANE FOUND THE HALL OF JUSTICE without difficulty. On his Earth, the villes followed the same basic blueprint, with only minor deviations from ville to ville. Brigid had explained it to him recently, discovering a hidden pattern to the construction of man’s cities. It was an Annunaki design, tooled to affect an occupant’s thinking processes. Variations on the same design could be found throughout history, each one a secret monument to man’s slavery and his subservience to the Annunaki will.
Kane approached with the setting sun at his rear, hiding in the shadows it cast. The sunset painted the silver-gray clouds a peachy red as it dwindled in the sky. Carved from stone, the building was several stories high. A stylized representation of Justice stood on a plinth that was inset on a central balcony, presiding over its upper levels in blindfold with scales descending from her outstretched hand. Kane smiled with ironic amusement when he realized that Justice was not a woman, but rather a representation of a hybrid, like Baron Cobalt or any one of the other barons he had encountered in his life since leaving Cobaltville. Like so much of this ville, the exterior stone walls of the Hall of Justice had turned dark as charcoal where they had been burned, streaks of black running across the paler stone like a tiger’s stripes. The windows were dark, too, caked with debris.